Kind: captions
Language: en
you pretty much just spit into this tube
and it goes up so slowly
it takes maybe like two three minutes
tops and then you put it in a container
and you get
your results in like 12 hours
the university of illinois is trying to
control the spread of cobin 19
by collecting spit illinois testing
is i mean that has been one of the major
innovations
of our time and as far as large public
universities have gone flexible
universities have gone
illinois has been able to keep its case
count lower than a lot of places that we
would
expect uh it to sort of follow like the
university of georgia or the university
of texas that kind of thing
the u of i implemented a mandatory
screening program that tests students
for the coronavirus two or three times a
week
it's one of the largest programs in the
country using a saliva based test
created in-house
and one of the only mandating frequent
testing and that's
fairly fairly uncommon amongst
universities
most universities are opting for
only symptomatic testing so testing
students when
they start to exhibit symptoms that's a
massive issue
because of how we know this virus
spreads most people
in that age group in the 18 to 25 year
old age group
who get covet 19 will be asymptomatic so
if you're testing only symptomatic
people
you're not going to catch the disease as
it spreads the u of i built an entire
system for testing campus goers
centered around a coronavirus test that
samples the amount of virus in saliva
students need proof of recent negative
test results to gain access to campus
buildings
it says granted and that means i've had
a
recent negative test so for the
undergrads if you haven't had a negative
test in three days it says deny
and they can't get into a building if
students do
test positive they get a push
notification on the app
and are put into isolation either in an
isolation dorm
or a hotel room we have had students
with symptoms but we have not had a
student hospitalized and of course
that that means there have been no
student deaths
while the testing is central to the
university strategy
building a new culture on campus has
been a large part of the effort to
control the spread of the virus
socialization and culture are really
important when it comes to this virus
culturally it's it's hard for students
to buy into testing when they know they
have to go
get get get their brain picked every
every week or so they simply planned
earlier
and better than i would say everyone
else
in april researchers started developing
a test that didn't require the supplies
needed for a nasal test
things like swabs and solutions that
were hard to find earlier this year
due to a national shortage if you heat
the saliva at 95 degrees
c for 30 minutes it does a few really
really important things one is that it
inactivates the virus
secondly it enables the genetic material
to be
accessible and thirdly it inactivates
the components in
saliva that are inhibitory to pcr
pcr or polymerase chain reaction
is a method researchers use to detect
the coronavirus
by amplifying and looking for the
viruses genetic material
rna scientists found that heating up the
samples prepares it for the pcr process
without
all of the reagents needed for the nasal
swab with the addition of one buffer
the sample is ready for pcr so we don't
need a swab
we don't need the viral transport medium
and we don't need the rna isolation kit
all of those are gone and so we don't
have any of those supply chain
bottlenecks that's also why our test is
so cheap because we don't have to pay
for any of those things
so and also why it's so fast the test
also gives information about viral load
or how much of the virus is in a sample
that information coupled with a record
of recent tests
can be key in identifying how long
someone has been infected
we actually get a quantitative readout
of how many copies of the virus per
milliliter of your saliva and so we've
been using that ct value it's called the
cycle threshold
which is a direct readout of the
concentration of the virus to help make
decisions if you've got 15 negatives in
a row and now all of a sudden they just
flip positive
that means you caught them on the way up
so it's context dependent
testing everyone who comes on campus
multiple times a week is no small
undertaking
their labs run around the clock often
processing more than 10 000 samples a
day
one in 50 covet 19 tests in america
happens at the university of illinois
every day i want to be very clear here
not 1 in 50 tests on college campuses in
america
1 in 50 tests in america happens at the
university of illinois
while the testing has been key to
controlling the spread of the virus
it hasn't stopped the spread when
students returned to campus for the fall
term there were two big spikes in cases
one researchers predicted the other
an unwelcome surprise so we modeled that
seven to eight thousand students would
go to parties two or three times per
week
and we modeled that they might not wear
their masks all the time at their party
so we knew this was going to be
a challenge and we still predicted we'd
be in really good shape what we didn't
model however was that students who
knew they were positive would still go
to a party or if they knew they were
positive they would host a party in
their house
and that's what got us that's what
surprised us county contract tracers
have found that most cases in undergrads
stem from either social gatherings
or from where they live there is no
evidence of infection in class there's
no clusters by class group
and university researchers don't think
that infections among the student
population
are spreading to faculty and staff or to
the community around
campus the student group tends to infect
amongst themselves and then the faculty
and staff what we see
is infections acquired in the community
now as cases rise across the u.s
researchers are noticing an uptick on
campus too
adding to growing concern about the
holidays having everybody leave
and then come back is one of the biggest
challenges chances are
it's going to be a very challenging
event it's almost like we saw when they
all came back the first time
you know they bring back a lot of cases
with them so our hope was that they
would a lot of them would just choose to
stay home
that said we've been doing lots of
surveys and turns out a lot of them are
coming back i think we all have to
recognize we're in for a really tough
next three months or so the new normal
is we have to rethink how we socialize
we've got to do it differently
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