University of Illinois hits 1,000,000 coronavirus tests faster than 10 U.S. states
·Reporter
Tue, December 15, 2020, 10:04 AM CST
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has administered one million COVID-19 tests over the course of 2020, according to the school’s dashboard.
This means that the school — which is located in Central Illinois, about 150 miles south of Chicago — has done more tests than the states of Wyoming, Vermont, South Dakota, Montana, Hawaii, Idaho, Delaware, Kansas, New Hampshire, and Maine.
“This milestone is far more than an accumulation of lab results,” the school’s chancellor Robert Jones said in a statement. “Every one of those million tests was a personal decision to protect friends, co-workers, and complete strangers.”
“We knew that testing was going to be really important, but testing is not a silver bullet,” Martin Burke, a chemistry professor at the university who helped design the school’s COVID-19 test, told Yahoo Finance.
(Screenshot of UIUC dashboard on December 15, 2020)
Using testing ‘to go on offense’
Burke explained that the school used testing “to go on offense” along with tracing and isolating cases before they escalated into outbreaks and developing an app to identify and inform people if they’ve been in contact with someone who has been infected.
The university is not alone in successfully controlling the spread of the coronavirus on campus. Duke University was also singled out by the CDC for its COVID strategy. Illinois and Duke are among a group of 106 colleges that performed testing on arrival, according to one small survey of 289 colleges in October.
A COVID-19 saliva sample is collected as testing is conducted on July 7, 2020, in a tent on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. (Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
The University of Illinois is in a league of its own, though.
Burke explained that the test administered by UIUC is saliva-based, rather than nasal testing, which is a lot less unpleasant, much faster, and allowed UIUC to get around supply chain constraints.
About 44 schools in the survey used saliva-based testing while the majority used nasal specimens and nasopharyngeal methods. The wider public does not have broad access to this saliva-based testing.
Testing was also administered repeatedly on students, faculty, staff, and retirees of the school. For instance, undergraduates who remained on campus after the Thanksgiving break had to test negative every other day to keep their building access, until Dec. 18, which was the end of the fall semester.
“Driven largely by the volume of testing at [UIUC], Champaign County accounts for nearly 10% of all testing conducted within the state since the beginning of the pandemic,” the school’s website states, “and about 0.5% of all national testing.”
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
More than 200 campuses have reported conducting surveillance testing and asymptomatic screening on their residential students, with about a quarter testing them more than once a week.
The wider public is experiencing slowdowns not just in accessing testing, but also receiving results.
And most important: It was also free for these groups on campus. Even though the price of testing so many and so regularly was high — about $10 for each saliva test — spending around $10 to $15 million was ultimately “the best investment you can make,” when compared to the cost of keeping campus on lockdown, Burke said.
“If universities can do it, they should do it. And as a country, we should do it,” he added.
The U.S. topped 300,000 deaths. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)
Once those on campus were tested, the school could effectively monitor any reports of positive cases, and if necessary, isolate the COVID-positive individual.
The school also accelerated development of the ‘Safer Illinois’ mobile app that uses bluetooth technology to notify a user if they are in the vicinity of someone who had recently tested positive. 45,000 users have downloaded it.
The app also has a status screen which they need to use to gain entry to university facilities during the pandemic. “Actually a bunch of bars and restaurants started using it,” Burke noted, “so it became a great way to engage with our community and help promote safe socialization.”
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana chancellor Robert J. Jones on October 8, 2016 in Champaign, Illinois. (Photo by Michael Hickey/Getty Images)
‘One of the safest places to be’
There were cases of students in the university flouting rules and holding large gatherings, which earned the condemnation of school administrators. But those cases did not escalate into full-blown outbreaks.
“We kept classes open, we kept businesses open, we kept research going,” Burke said. “We had no hospitalizations, … and thankfully just no deaths.”
UIUC Chancellor Robert Jones, who joined Yahoo Finance in an interview in late November added: “My university, my campus is one of the safest places to be.”
The school is now working with several partners to help colleges — including Notre Dame — as well as K-12 school districts and even companies across the country.
Given that young people are not likely to be vaccinated in the near-term, “testing could be a critical bridge,” Burke noted. “It's going to take longer than any of us would like, and we've got to get our kids back to school. … We can't take a year off, to just wait for the vaccine to get distributed.”
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Aarthi Swaminathan is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering education. If you have a story idea, or would like to share how your college or school is preparing to reopen, reach out to her at aarthi@yahoofinance.com
Above is from: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/university-of-illinois-hits-1-m-coronavirus-tests-more-than-ten-us-states-160457366.html
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