The kids have already been with the family 24/7 during lockdown so won't be contagious as 14 days has gone by right? Can the kids get it a second time though?
That's not the issue.
The issue is that somewhere, in that group of thousands (millions) of kids, some kid will get a new case. Maybe their mom is a nurse (maybe their mom is a nurse who is being denied use of a mask). Maybe their dad runs a factory. People are going to work sick across all open sectors. So if we opened May 1, you can see what would happen.
Because kids are asymptomatic, thousands of parents will get CV from their kids when the schools reopen. The Netherlands has had an outbreak similar to most of the US outside NY/NJ - and they have study showing that only 3% of the general population has antibodies. So while they contained the virus well enough, 97% of the citizens are at risk.
We don't know that rate for the US, but I'm guessing California is about the same as The Netherlands.
What about just taking the temperature of the visitor? High temperature then you cannot visit that day. That is how they have been screening some health workers. Does that work?
No. That doesn't work and merely gets rid of the most virulent people. Tons of people without fevers are shedding virus all over the place. In fact, the peak of shedding may in fact be right before the fever sets in.
And we do not know how long after the fever subsides that the virus is still shedding.
Fever checking only gets rid of super-spreaders. Keep in mind that the asymptomatic people are 40-80% of the total, depending on place and what study you read (extremely significant to find out - but 40% is still quite high).
Why didn’t one of them stay home with that toddler!
Because most humans are only rational on occasion.
We are more creatures of habit than of reason.
WSers are on a far end of a continuum, being one of the most reasonable groups of people discussing CoVid (that I can find).
Why did the woman let her toddler run around sucking things? is the question that's more to the point for me.
I guess since measles, mumps, rubella, polio, whooping cough and even small pox was still around when I was raised, all of our parents would have jointly and collectively put a kabash to "toddler running around in store" and especially "mouth on things in the store."
This was a brand new virus, thus we did not have any tests at the start of this crisis. It took awhile to develop them.
There are other factors too. The machines needed to run the test are DNA sequencers (PCR machines; thermal sequencers). They cost about $100,000-$500,000+. All large universities and hospitals have them, all regional labs have them. But, they've never needed to test this many people using PCR - ever - in history. So no one was prepared with the machines.
Apparently they aren't that hard to make and universities do train medical engineers and computer scientists to improve on them and make them. But not every place has an equal number of them.
You can take all the swabs you want, but until you have enough machines to not have a backlog, the results are slow (that's why those new "instant tests" that apparently don't require a PCR are so important - they're being tested). In California, it's about a 4-5 day wait to get results for the mildly/moderately symptomatic. At one point, until we built more PCR machines and worked out an agreement with regional labs about testing, we had a backlog of 10's of thousands of tests.
We still do not have enough PCR capacity to increase testing, because as you can see, patients are already waiting (we need to know whether a patient has CV before treating or admitting them).