Colleges and universities across the country have handled the pandemic in different ways, but one campus whose plan for the fall semester was received with skepticism was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Last fall, the university announced that it planned to bring the entire campus back in the fall by using an unproven COVID-19 test that its own researchers had developed.
With the first semester now in the books and students back on campus for their second, the university is looking back at how it handled COVID-19, and the results suggest their method could become a nationwide model as we continue to work to come out of the pandemic.
The university said their positivity rate plunged below 1%, and they had no major outbreaks, hospitalizations or deaths. School officials expect similar results this semester, and their personal testing protocol is at the heart of this belief.
Illinois’ Testing System
After the campus closed last March, chemistry professor Paul Hergenrother began brainstorming COVID-19 testing solutions. He realized that everyone on campus would need to be tested repeatedly to really help reduce asymptomatic transmission, and he also understood that mass nasal swab testing would be costly and difficult to pull off regularly. Instead, he and his team quickly began looking into saliva-based testing.
In what they called a six-week “blitz” period, the team attempted to develop a quick, efficient and inexpensive COVID-19 test. Thousands of different attempts failed before they found a solution that involved heating a saliva sample to 95 degrees for 30 minutes to kill the virus before it could be safely handled by health workers to be analyzed to see if the virus was present.
An on-campus veterinary lab was converted into a testing facility, but researchers understood that mass testing was only part of the equation. They also needed to have quick turn-around times so that students weren’t unknowingly spreading the virus while waiting on test results. That led to the development of twice-weekly mandatory surveillance testing on campus that provided for test results within 12 hours. But again, quick test results were only part of an effective solution.
Next, researchers needed to develop a way manage students who tested positive. The university saw a large surge in infections after the first week of classes, mainly because students who had the virus were not effectively self-isolating. On Sept. 2, the university urged students to stay home for two weeks except for essential activities and threatened suspensions for students who didn’t follow instructions from the Champaign-Urbana Public Health Distract. More than 1,000 were disciplined and some were even removed from campus by late October, but the university eventually got the students to buy into the system and now COVID is all but eradicated on campus.
Currently, students are in the midst of a two-week “onboarding” process where all students need to receive a negative COVID-19 test and are advised to only go out for essential activities. Once students have completed the protocol, the second semester will get underway with the same testing methods that made the first so successful.
Hopefully the University of Illinois continues to maintain a stronghold over the virus and many campuses across the United States adopt similar measures to keep students, staff and local communities safe.
