Teachers and kindergarten personnel are to be allowed to test themselves and one-another on Covid-19 in the future. This decision was enacted on December 4 and will be implemented in January 2021. The rapid tests are supposed to be distributed free of charge to schools and daycare centers for children. This is part of the strategy of area coverage tests for recognition of Covid-19 cases.

What at first glance sounds like a good measure in order to combat the pandemic, on second glance reveals itself as a foul solution. Until now it is not even clear who is to administer the tests. According to Lother Wieler, President of the Robert-Koch-Institut, teachers and preschool teachers are to be trained and made responsible for the tests of their fellow teachers.

In fast tracked training the pedagogical personnel is supposed to be trained in a medical intervention, that up until now was only to be conducted by doctors. The consequence will be a higher workload for the pedagogical personnel in this institutions, because the personnel will be absent from the everyday business there. The child care ratio will increase to the disadvantage of the teachers and in schools lead to cancellation of lessons, because the personnel will be required elsewhere.

The probability, that rapidly trained personnel – without any prior knowledge of work experience in this field of expertise – will make mistakes when conducting the tests is high. The consequence will be a much higher rate of errors in the test results. Rapid tests, when conducted correctly, have an error rate of 50%, but this rate will further drop when the tests are administered incorrectly.

So although this decision might seem as a good solution at first to limit the spreading of the pandemic, a more thorough look clearly indicated that this will only bring additional workload to the specialist pedagogical personnel and an even worse care for the children and youths. Furthermore, there is the questionable probability of success of this measures due to the limited reliance of the tests.

These hastily enacted measures for testing teachers and child care workers are the result of the massive cuts in the health services. These cuts for many years lead to increasing problems in the health care of other parts of the working class as well. Another example are the increasing patient rations at the hospitals for the care workers.