Mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 transmission at a large public university
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Abstract
In Fall 2020, universities saw extensive transmission of SARS-CoV-2 among their populations, threatening health of the university and surrounding communities, and viability of in-person instruction. Here we report a case study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where a multimodal “SHIELD: Target, Test, and Tell” program, with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, was employed to keep classrooms and laboratories open. The program included epidemiological modeling and surveillance, fast/frequent testing using a novel low-cost and scalable saliva-based RT-qPCR assay for SARS-CoV-2 that bypasses RNA extraction, called covidSHIELD, and digital tools for communication and compliance. In Fall 2020, we performed >1,000,000 covidSHIELD tests, positivity rates remained low, we had zero COVID-19-related hospitalizations or deaths amongst our university community, and mortality in the surrounding Champaign County was reduced more than 4-fold relative to expected. This case study shows that fast/frequent testing and other interventions mitigated transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at a large public university.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.03.21261548: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources The exposure notification (EN) relies on the Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Project developed by Apple and Google. Googlesuggested: (Google, RRID:SCR_017097)Extended Data Table 4 summarizes the method comparison study completed to support the correlation between saliva samples processed with covidSHIELD and nasal samples processed with Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay performed on the Abbott m2000 System. Abbottsuggested: (Abbott, RRID:SCR_010477)Ct values were plotted as single replicate values on a scatter plot, using GraphPad Prism 8 (version 8.4.2). GraphPad Prismsuggested: …SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.03.21261548: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources The exposure notification (EN) relies on the Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Project developed by Apple and Google. Googlesuggested: (Google, RRID:SCR_017097)Extended Data Table 4 summarizes the method comparison study completed to support the correlation between saliva samples processed with covidSHIELD and nasal samples processed with Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay performed on the Abbott m2000 System. Abbottsuggested: (Abbott, RRID:SCR_010477)Ct values were plotted as single replicate values on a scatter plot, using GraphPad Prism 8 (version 8.4.2). GraphPad Prismsuggested: (GraphPad Prism, RRID:SCR_002798)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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