Harvard University said it plans to test undergraduates living on campus for coronavirus as often as every three days.
Photo: Anik Rahman/Zuma PressUniversities, seeking to bring students back to campus this fall during the coronavirus pandemic, are laying out reopening plans that rely heavily on their health departments arranging widespread, frequent testing of students, faculty and staff.
Some worry about whether the nation’s testing capacity can keep up.
The Texas A&M University System said on Tuesday that it has negotiated with Curative Inc., a testing company in California, to send 15,000 test kits with mouth swabs to its campuses each month. Chapman University in Orange, Calif., is spending $1.65 million to contract with Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings for mass testing.
Princeton University, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology will test students once they arrive on campus, then test regularly thereafter, with Harvard saying it plans to test undergraduates living on campus as often as every three days. Purdue University, in Indiana, said last week that it would require its more than 40,000 students to be tested before coming back to campus and would provide instructions on how and when to get tests in August while allowing time to process and report results before they arrive.
These moves, a sampling of broad testing plans being formulated across U.S. academia, follow calls from the Trump administration and elsewhere to get students back to campus after most colleges shut down during the spring outbreak. And yet, while few argue with the goal of resuming students’ education, a debate is under way over how best to assure their safety and to avoid becoming incubators facilitating the spread of the virus.
Testing is widely acknowledged as necessary to track the spread of the virus and to suppress clusters once they emerge. But the nation’s ability to conduct and process Covid-19 tests is already straining to complete 600,000 a day, with a shortage of processing capacity, as well as a shortage of reagents, plastics, swabs and other necessary materials.
Related Video
Adding tests for hundreds of thousands of students to the mix, some say, could cause further backlogs and equipment shortages. And with results in some parts of the country taking four or five or even seven days, timing the pre-arrival tests—and finding value in their results—could be challenging.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is discouraging widespread testing of the asymptomatic as a screening tool, recommending instead that schools follow the lead of such cities as Austin, Texas, which is preserving testing capacity by focusing on symptomatic patients. The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement, said testing all students for infection before the start of school is “not feasible in most settings at this time.”
“There’s a real concern that the existing testing infrastructure is nowhere close to capable of widely testing asymptomatic individuals,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “This has been a concern among public-health folks for months: that the growth in testing capacity is far too slow to meet the level of demand that would enable businesses, schools, etc., to reopen safely.”
The CDC has said about 40.8 million tests have been conducted nationwide, with 3.6 million of them positive. States performed about 16.5 million tests in June.
Path to a Fall Semester
- Colleges Spend Millions to Prepare to Reopen Amid Coronavirus (June 24)
- At-Home Covid-19 Testing Arrives, With Accuracy and Access Questions (June 2)
- Big Question for Colleges: Will There Be a Fall Semester on Campus? (April 21)
- Amid ‘Ghost Towns,’ Students Have Mixed Views About Virus Shutdowns (March 14)
- What We Know About Coronavirus Tests, Treatment and Vaccines
For colleges—and some primary and secondary schools—testing is part of a broader push to assure safety through measures including contact tracing, social distancing, smaller or hybrid classes, mandatory face coverings and copious amounts of hand sanitizer to enable them to reopen campuses to at least a portion of students in the fall.
Public and private labs are nearing capacity because of increased testing due to a surge in cases. Lab giants Quest Diagnostics Inc. and LabCorp, which have administered millions of tests taken by other institutions, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“If our labs had more supplies and instruments, we could do more testing,” said Julie Khani, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, “but global demand has strained the supply chain.”
Schools are alleviating demand for supplies or stress on labs by relying on more point-of-care testing, including at-home testing and saliva tests, although health experts say there remain some questions about the testing accuracy of both methods compared with nasal-swab tests conducted in clinical settings, which are generally more sensitive. Many of those at-home and saliva tests also require materials that have been in short supply.
University of California, San Diego in the fall will test on-campus students for coronavirus through a self-testing system, internal resources and multiple testing platforms, said spokeswoman Christine Clark. An early-June pilot showed the system is feasible, she said.
“We wanted a simple, easy testing process which can be delivered at scale in the fall to ensure widespread testing for early outbreak detection,” she said. “Our simulations indicate that if more than 75% of the population were tested per month, we would be able to detect an outbreak before there are 10 detectable infections on campus.”
A closed cafeteria at the University of California, San Diego in the city’s La Jolla neighborhood earlier this month.
Photo: Bing Guan/Bloomberg NewsOther schools are using their own labs or spreading their tests among different labs for processing.
Purdue said it would use a variety of lab partners and approaches to sampling to manage the risk of overburdened testing systems and intends to announce more details soon.
Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, detailed on June 30 a plan to conduct about 85,000 tests over its fall semester—nearly as many as its home state has done since the pandemic hit. The school’s testing program will be administered by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical research center, and would require students to be tested before arrival on campus and again three times in the opening weeks of the semester.
Once they arrive, students would be tested twice a week, Colby has said. To streamline the process, the school said it would have students, faculty and staff self-administer the nasal swabs, then drop them at collection points around campus, with results returned within 24 hours.
The Trump administration is expected to announce as soon as this week guidance and possible regulation for pooled testing—in which multiple people are screened using a single test—that could help alleviate the strain on testing infrastructure.
Pooled testing, however, has limitations because it generally isn’t useful if the test positivity rate in an area is above 10%, health experts said. The U.S. test positivity rate is around 9%.
“We agree federal guidance is needed and is in development,” said Adm. Brett Giroir, who heads the Trump administration’s coronavirus-testing strategy. “More to come in the coming days,” he said Monday.
Write to Stephanie Armour at stephanie.armour@wsj.com and Melissa Korn at melissa.korn@wsj.com
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"plan" - Google News
July 15, 2020 at 06:37PM
https://ift.tt/3h2PcNq
Universities’ Plan to Test Students for Covid-19 to Increase Demand on Testing Capacity - The Wall Street Journal
"plan" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2un5VYV
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Universities’ Plan to Test Students for Covid-19 to Increase Demand on Testing Capacity - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment