Launching a saliva-based SARS-CoV-2 surveillance testing program on a university campus
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Abstract
Regular surveillance testing of asymptomatic individuals for SARS-CoV-2 has been center to SARS-CoV-2 outbreak prevention on college and university campuses. Here we describe the voluntary saliva testing program instituted at the University of California, Berkeley during an early period of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in 2020. The program was administered as a research study ahead of clinical implementation, enabling us to launch surveillance testing while continuing to optimize the assay. Results of both the testing protocol itself and the study participants’ experience show how the program succeeded in providing routine, robust testing capable of contributing to outbreak prevention within a campus community and offer strategies for encouraging participation and a sense of civic responsibility.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.24.21250385: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Since these results were from a test yet to be validated under the CLIA framework, we included specific language in the results describing this limitation (Appendix 2). Participants with positive or inconclusive results were additionally contacted via phone by one of the study clinicians. It became critical to quickly recommend isolation to these individuals, follow up with confirmatory testing external to the study, and manage any …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.24.21250385: (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
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Since these results were from a test yet to be validated under the CLIA framework, we included specific language in the results describing this limitation (Appendix 2). Participants with positive or inconclusive results were additionally contacted via phone by one of the study clinicians. It became critical to quickly recommend isolation to these individuals, follow up with confirmatory testing external to the study, and manage any symptoms that may have emerged. IGI FAST ended once the assay completed clinical validation as an LDT, obviating the need to administer it as a research study. UHS assumed responsibility for asymptomatic surveillance sample collection to consolidate surveillance sampling resources and personnel on the University of California, Berkeley campus. While we continue to run the saliva test in our laboratory as a clinically orderable test, it is currently deployed in a limited capacity, where its ease of use in a take-home setting better suits low compliance or off-campus student populations. Testing and participant characteristics: IGI FAST collected a total of 11,791 tests from its final cohort (Supplementary data 1). We identified five positive samples from five different individuals through IGI FAST, within the expected range of 3.6 – 33.5 positives predicted by the estimated asymptomatic and presymptomatic prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the City of Berkeley, CA during IGI FAST’s duration (Table 1). While our tested positivity rate falls within...
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.
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