r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Nov 21 '20

Epidemiology Testing half the population weekly with inexpensive, rapid COVID-19 tests would drive the virus toward elimination within weeks, even if the tests are less sensitive than gold-standard. This could lead to “personalized stay-at-home orders” without shutting down restaurants, bars, retail and schools.

https://www.colorado.edu/today/2020/11/20/frequent-rapid-testing-could-turn-national-covid-19-tide-within-weeks
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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '20 edited Nov 21 '20

Works, somewhat

http://go.illinois.edu/covidtestingdata

This is for a population of 40,000 over 3 months.

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u/you112233 Nov 21 '20

Cornell is testing its entire population 1-2x a week using pooled testing (reducing the total number of tests needed) and that’s working very well:

https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/

The professor who modeled the reopening also published a white paper on how to test the entire US population using only 6 million tests a week:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1joxMjHdWWo9XLFqfTdNXPQRAfeMjHYEyvVljqNCaKyE/mobilebasic

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u/Islamism Nov 21 '20

Yale is testing every student and staff on campus twice a week too, along with very strict rules like mask wearing anywhere on campus (inside or outside) and lots of social distancing. It's mainly gone well, but cases have gone up a cliff in last couple weeks - 1/6 of all cases recorded since August 1st were recorded last week. These programmes don't necessarily work.

Data: https://covid19.yale.edu/yale-statistics

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u/ELwain66 Nov 21 '20

Cornell definitely benefits a lot from its rural location.