Vaccines may be here, but the need for COVID-19 testing is not going away any time soon.

That’s the prediction of Tim Rowe, the CEO of CIC Health, a private company that has been overseeing COVID-19 testing programs and also running mass vaccination sites in Massachusetts.

“We are going to have a period of time where not everyone has the vaccine,” Rowe said. “And it's a little unclear what younger age groups will yet have the vaccine. And we have a world which is going to have storming COVID.” Rowe said the current forecast is it will take four years for the world to reach herd immunity, which means there is the possibility of new virus strains developing in other countries and migrating to the US.

“So if you are a policymaker making a plan for the fall and you want kids in school and you want to get us back to something like the economy that we had prior to the pandemic, you probably want to have in place a system that you know is going to work to track is there disease spreading?” Rowe said. “If it's spreading, what strains are they? And if there's a significant population which is not protected by vaccines - and that may be a lot of the kids in this country - you want to make sure that they're not spreading that disease within society.”