How a Pioneering Covid Testing Lab Helped Keep Northeast Colleges Open

Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard processes 45,000 Covid-19 tests a day for more than 100 colleges

By Melissa Korn of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The samples are whisked off to Cambridge, Mass., 150 miles away, and processed alongside tens of thousands of others overnight at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a biomedical and genomics research center.

A primary reason many colleges in Massachusetts, New York, Maine and Vermont have experienced few coronavirus outbreaks this fall has been frequent, widespread testing. At 108 colleges and universities, that testing is being done within a carefully orchestrated system run by the Broad Institute. 

The testing, along with strict, state-level quarantine orders and low levels of community spread in the region, has helped keep infection rates at schools working with Broad below 0.2%."

"“We really borrowed a lot of industrial principles of how factories are organized and how factories plan their work,” Stacey Gabriel, senior director of the Genomics Platform said. “It’s an automated assembly line.”"

"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at first urged schools to focus on testing symptomatic individuals and played down the need for entry or surveillance tests. In a late-September update, however, the CDC said those measures combined “might prevent or reduce” Covid-19 transmission."

"A. David Paltiel, a professor of public health at the Yale School of Medicine who ran an epidemiological modeling study on the new coronavirus this summer, called that latest conclusion “disingenuous and unscientific.”

His study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that testing all students every two days may be the threshold for safe college operations. Just screening for symptoms led to broad-based Covid-19 outbreaks in the model.

“Testing is like an early-warning missile system,” said Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. By identifying a positive case quickly, she said, schools can “manage it before it does a lot of damage.”"