As Colleges and Universities across the nation are beginning to re-open to students on their campuses, a variety of experiences are being realized, with some glaring occurrences of hotspot infections from the Covid-19 virus.
As many expected, a key aspect of each schools preparedness was going to be a requirement for significant testing. As could have been predicted, the need for high frequency of testing and the need for quick results are the Holy Grail. Additionally, a not unexpected challenge is addressing the most common source of the outbreaks – students living in off-campus housing.
The following excerpts from Bloomberg’s August 19th Business section, written by Emma Court and Janet Lorin, titled New College Must-Have: Covid Tests for Safe Return to Campus, examine various approaches being taken to achieve those goals and to better address the impacts of students in off-campus housing:
Some schools are requiring test results before a student gets to school, others are offering screenings upon arrival. Still others are relying on symptom screening and random surveillance testing. And the lucky ones with their own labs are putting them to work, regularly testing swabs or saliva from those on campus for the novel coronavirus.
- The University of Notre Dame, like UNC, invited students back early in August but required them to be tested before arrival. Still, it saw results surge, hitting 147 on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the first case was diagnosed
Contact tracing efforts found that most cases traced to seniors living off-campus.
That prompted President John Jenkins to move all undergraduate classes online for at least two weeks and clamp down on activity, restricting students in off-campus housing from coming to campus. Public spaces on campus were closed and residence halls were restricted to those who live there, and gathering limits were cut in half to 10 people.
The school administers tests at its football stadium where those with symptoms can be tested. Jenkins said in an on-line address on Tuesday evening that “we will in coming weeks both enhance our testing of those experiencing symptoms and our surveillance testing of those without symptoms.” If those measures contain the spread, in-person learning could resume, Jenkins said. If not, students would be sent home as they were in the spring semester.
- Northeastern University in Boston will require three negative tests before a student can begin in-person classes. They’ll test every two to three days with medical professionals observing them as they self-swab in either a central sports facility or a separate facility intended for those who had close contact with someone who tested positive. The university aims to test students every five days thereafter for the rest of the semester.
To handle this high frequency testing protocol, the university built a new lab at a campus in Burlington, Massachusetts, where it aims to process up to 5,000 tests a day and partners with the Broad Institute in nearby Cambridge for added resources.
- The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is preparing to screen about 60,000 students, faculty and staff twice a week.
When it began developing its testing strategy in May, the need for frequent screenings with quick turnaround times quickly became clear. But even state-of-the-art testing “was never going to get us there,” said Marty Burke, associate dean of research for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine who led the school’s testing and tracing program.
So Illinois developed a new (rapid) test for which it’s seeking emergency authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Similar to one developed by Yale researchers and funded by the National Basketball Association that won emergency authorization on Aug. 15, Illinois’s test uses saliva, allowing for easier collection at about 20 tents scattered across campus. The school is setting up a company to make the technology more broadly available.
Tests will be conducted at a converted veterinary lab, where they’re usually looking at illnesses in cows and pigs, Burke said. The shorter process streamlines logistics and requires less machinery and supplies. It also brings down costs to about $10 per test and aims to have capacity to process 20,000 tests a day, according to Burke.
One takeaway from the article is that only looking at your facilities and existing resources as they are currently used, limits the ability to control the outcome to this pandemic. Developing or partnering with other organizations to have new approaches to rapid testing; re-purposing existing laboratory space for testing labs; using large existing facilities like stadiums and gyms to be able to test a lot of students in a short period of time, are all opportunities to address the crisis and maintain student and teacher health.
Contributor: Buck Collins – Associate & Senior Director Business Development at Kimmel Bogrette
