'Scuola sicura': a school screening testing programme to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in students in Piedmont.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: 'Scuola sicura' (SS) programme aims to monitor the rate of COVID-19 and to contain its spread within the school population through early case isolation. OBJECTIVES: to describe the initial process and outcome evaluation results. DESIGN: descriptive study of an experimental screening testing programme in children in Piedmont Region (Northern Italy) in the period January-March 2021. The data used came from the COVID-19 platform and the Local Health Units, the archives of birth certificates (CedAP), and hospital discharge files (SDO). SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS: the screening programme targeted second and third grade students in first level secondary schools. Participants were subdivided into four groups; one group each week underwent screening, yielding one test per student per month. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: it was calculated 1. number of positive cases detected vs total number of students tested in the SS programme; 2. number of positive cases detected outside the SS program vs. total number of students in the target population. The number of quarantines due to SS and no-SS case identification were detected. To investigate the spread of COVID-19 in households, the mother-child pairs were identified through record linkage between the CedAP and SDO archives, and positive mothers were identified. RESULTS: sixty-nine percent of schools and 19.5% of the students participated in the programme. SS detected 114 positives cases for SARS-CoV-2. On 08.03.2021, the target classes started distance learning 69 of the 114 positive students were identified before that date, leading to the activation of 67 quarantine measures. Only for 61 out of 69 of those students (88%) was possible to identify the mother; 46 mothers had performed a swab test after the positivity of their child with a positive result in 11 cases. Asymptomatic cases identified at screening during in-class learning period accounted for 26.5% of the total number of cases occurred in the participating classes. CONCLUSIONS: this is one of the few studies (and the first in Italy) to describe the functioning and predictive capacity of school screening testing for SARS-CoV-2 in a real-world situation. The findings provide data-driven suggestions for government agencies when planning large-scale school screening testing programmes.