With a new school year underway, Indianapolis-based testing lab Aria Diagnostics is seeing four times as many COVID-19 test requests as before schools reopened, Fox 59 reported. Most of the requests are coming from pediatricians.
"I think testing soared because children went back to school," pediatrician Eric Yancy, MD, told Fox 59. "When you have large groups of children, they will transmit things back and forth."
Many Indianapolis school districts have imposed mask mandates, including Indianapolis Public Schools, the state's largest.
Children under 12 are still ineligible for COVID-19 vaccination, and Dr. Yancy said some test sites don't accept samples from that age group.
"Fortunately for us with COVID, we never stopped testing, so we have been able to see the trends for the last 18 months now," Vipin Adhlahka, president of Aria Diagnostics, told Fox 59. "The other day we had an entire classroom come through our drive-thru testing site. All 26 students and their parents got tested for a known exposure."