In January, the pool tests that have been carried out in schools for a long time were also extended to preschools in NRW. The expansion of the pool tests has led to an enormous increase in the workload of the testing laboratories. The majority of laboratories are working at maximum capacity, which means that PCR tests are being evaluated 24 hours a day.
In practice, when a class or daycare group is tested, the sample is brought to the laboratory by a courier service and then tested. If the sample is positive, a single PCR test is taken from all participants who were in the test pool. The school and the day care centers may not be entered until a negative test result is available.
This poses many problems for the majority of parents. Often it takes an enormously long time until these tests are evaluated. If the test cannot be evaluated, a new test must be made, which again takes a lot of time. An alternative are private PCR tests that are evaluated in a short time, depending on the price even in less than an hour. However, these are enormously expensive and not affordable for working class parents, especially not in the long run. In the time until the evaluation of the tests, the parents have to take care of the children at home and have to take either vacation or children's sick days during that time. Quickly, a large portion of annual leave or children's sick days can be used up. While those who can afford it can quickly "take time off".
The handling of the situation shows once again that the bourgeoisie is not willing to solve this problem. In order to relieve the laboratories, it was decided that in the case of a positive test pool, the affected school children and teaching staff would only have to take a simple rapid test to clear themselves. These are much less accurate and lead to the virus spreading further.
Instead of creating the infrastructure that has the testing capacity to handle this mass of testing, a cheaper "solution" is accepted to treat the problem superficially. The shortage of PCR tests has gone so far that there have been initial discussions about prioritizing them and giving priority to "system-relevant" professional groups. Even if there is no test prioritization for the time being, the procedure and the discussion show that the bourgeoisie does not care about the health of the broad masses.
