Open AccessA method for campus-wide SARS-CoV-2 surveillance at a large public university
Author(s) -
Terren Chang,
Jolene M. Draper,
Anouk van den Bout,
Ellen Kephart,
Hannah M. Maul-Newby,
Yvonne Vasquez,
Jason Woodbury,
Savanna S. Randi,
Martina Pedersen,
Maeve Nave,
Scott La,
Natalie M. Gallagher,
Molly M. McCabe,
Namrita Dhillon,
Isabel Bjork,
M. Page Luttrell,
Frank Dang,
John B. MacMillan,
Ralph Green,
Elizabeth Miller,
A. Marm Kilpatrick,
Olena M. Vaske,
Michael D. Stone,
Jeremy R. Sanford
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0261230
Subject(s) - pandemic , pooling , workflow , diagnostic test , covid-19 , medicine , public health , clinical microbiology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , test (biology) , medical physics , medical emergency , computer science , disease , emergency medicine , pathology , biology , paleontology , database , artificial intelligence , microbiology and biotechnology
The systematic screening of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals is a powerful tool for controlling community transmission of infectious disease on college campuses. Faced with a paucity of testing in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many universities developed molecular diagnostic laboratories focused on SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic testing on campus and in their broader communities. We established the UC Santa Cruz Molecular Diagnostic Lab in early April 2020 and began testing clinical samples just five weeks later. Using a clinically-validated laboratory developed test (LDT) that avoided supply chain constraints, an automated sample pooling and processing workflow, and a custom laboratory information management system (LIMS), we expanded testing from a handful of clinical samples per day to thousands per day with the testing capacity to screen our entire campus population twice per week. In this report we describe the technical, logistical, and regulatory processes that enabled our pop-up lab to scale testing and reporting capacity to thousands of tests per day.