Alternate headline: Welcome to shortage economies and the corruption they incentivize. With vaccine/test mandates coming down from Panem — er, Washington DC — demand for COVID-19 tests to allow for public engagement has gone through the roof. Politico points out that this has created a “Hunger Games” situation in which organizations have to find ways to outdo each other to survive.

The biggest loser will likely be K-12 schools, Politico points out:

An avalanche of student Covid-19 test kits covered a FedEx drop box in Chicago. Long lines and delayed deliveries slowed school testing sites in California. And families scrambled across U.S. cities to find scarce rapid tests.

The White House and government leaders say classrooms must stay open during a record surge in Omicron-driven cases — but short supplies, logistical challenges and workforce problems threaten to trip up the country’s patchwork efforts to test schoolchildren for the virus as they return to class.

“This is reminiscent of October 2020, when we only had so many antigen tests to go around and it was literally the Hunger Games. States were really competing to try to get the supply that they needed,” said Leah Perkinson, the pandemic manager for the Rockefeller Foundation, which has collaborated with the Education Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to expand the country’s school testing programs.

“There are supply constraints and folks aren’t able to do what they want to do, or continue to do what they’re doing. And that’s frustrating,” she said.

Why in God’s name are we testing children for COVID-19 in classrooms? If they’re not symptomatic, they’re also not a vector for the disease. If they are symptomatic, send them home. The only reason to test children for the virus is for the sake of teachers and administrators, all of whom had priority access to vaccines during that shortage market. If they have been vaccinated and boosted, then they’re at no more health risk in the Omicron wave than they would be against the flu — and we don’t require vaccinations and/or constant testing for the flu in children, for which they certainly are vectors for community transmission.

If those teachers and staffers chose not to get vaccinated, then that’s a risk burden they have assumed. It shouldn’t get transferred to children or their parents.

By the way, the hungering might be in vain anyway. According to Axios, the current tests in short supply would probably be too unreliable for the kind of access control envisioned:

Rapid tests have been hailed as a way to weather the Omicron surge without mass disruption to everyday life. But they’ve been in short supply for weeks, and now new research — along with loads of anecdotal evidence — suggests there may be significant limitations to their usefulness with this variant.
Driving the news: A small preprint study released Wednesday found that, among a case study of 30 people who took nasal rapid antigen tests and saliva PCR tests at the same time, four of them transmitted the virus following a false negative rapid antigen test.

• The median time between their first positive PCR test and their first positive antigen test was three days.
• “Based on viral load and transmissions confirmed through epidemiological investigation, most Omicron cases were infectious for several days before being detectable by rapid antigen tests,” the authors conclude.
• “The policy implication is that rapid antigen tests may not be as fit-for-purpose in routine workplace screening to prevent asymptomatic spread of Omicron, compared to prior variants, given the shorter time from exposure to infectiousness and lower infectious doses sufficient for transmission,” they add.

The good news is that a much-more-tolerable saliva test may be more accurate than the nasal-swab options commercially produced at the moment. That would reduce testing reluctance, as the nasal swabs are uncomfortable for most patients. However, this means that even the very limited testing we can perform now is probably worthless thanks to the rate of false negatives, not to mention that the rapid transmission rate of Omicron likely makes testing moot anyway.

Given that the data on Omicron shows that it’s remarkably less dangerous and that it’s now 95% or greater of all genome-sequenced COVID-19 cases in the US, testing and vaccine mandates are pointless. One is in a hopeless shortage situation that won’t resolve until well after this wave breaks, and the other is in plentitude and easy access for all. It’s time to stop playing games and get back to normal life and normal risk mitigation.