Students returning to Duke University are participating in surveillance testing to help rapidly identify and isolate people who may have contracted the COVID-19 virus. This is done using pool testing, which combines nasal samples from five people for a single test to allow more testing using fewer resources. If a pooled test comes back positive, each student in that sample will be tested individually to identify who has contracted the virus and follow through with any isolation procedures.
Pooled surveillance testing will be used to understand where the virus is on Duke’s campus and how it’s being transmitted and to identify potential hotspots that may require more testing. This large-scale effort was designed and coordinated by dozens of Duke’s faculty, researchers and staff across disciplines.
Learn more about this effort at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute