Logan Ramsey
News Editor
Idaho State University instituted a mandatory COVID-19 screening program as students returned back to campus for the spring semester, but it got off to a rough start when they had to cancel screenings with some students. This was due to a massive test backlog with the testing facility in California they contracted with.
ISU health officials designed the screening program over the month of December, originally with the intention that anyone with an on-campus presence would take two COVID-19 screenings over the month of January. This would allow the university to identify asymptomatic cases, which according to Rex Force, Vice President for Health Sciences, account for up to half of new cases.
“We’re coming back from the holidays, we know people have traveled, they’ve spent time with family, they’ve had New Year’s parties and done things like that and we expect, like we saw after Thanksgiving, that we might have a bump in cases and we wanted to really focus on the asymptomatic group,” Force said.
So to set up this testing, ISU contracted with a testing facility in Sunnyvale, California to do extensive testing for the first three weeks of January and then to scale back the screenings over the course of the semester. They had heard excellent references for this facility and expected a result return time of 24 to 72 hours.
“We felt really comfortable going in that we would be able to execute our plan and unfortunately the supply chain issues and the staffing issues caught up with us right in the first two weeks of January,” Force said.
In an order of test tubes, the lab received 200,000 defective tubes which caused a supply chain disruption in ISU’s testing kits. At this same time, the lab was experiencing staffing problems and didn’t have enough resources to complete the test volume they were at.
In order to address the problem, the university suspended appointments for the first week of school to allow the lab to catch up on their testing volume. This was also when they decided to decrease the number of screenings to one in the month of January. They don’t expect to run into the same problem again.
“The work that everybody did here on campus was exemplary over the holidays to get ready to do, literally, thousands of tests over the first three weeks,” Force said.
Between Jan. 13-19, the University reported 71 new COVID-19 cases, the most reported cases of the whole pandemic. With the increase in testing, this is expected.
“Having more widespread screening will increase the number of individuals we identify as being ill. The key point here is that these are all asymptomatic individuals. These people have not been exposed and they do not have any symptoms of COVID so we’re detecting those silent cases that are spreading it in the community and that’s the benefit that occurs here,” Force said.
The university has already conducted between three to four thousand tests this semester, and they’ve discovered a screening positivity rate of just over 1%, which Force finds reassuring.
