On the first day of fall classes, a record number of students, faculty and staff took COVID-19 tests at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, using the school’s pioneering saliva-based technology.
Of the 17,656 tests conducted Monday alone, 97 were positive, according to university data.
On Tuesday, however, 120 positive results were identified from 15,850 new tests, the highest number found in a single day since the testing program launched in early July. Those results brought the rolling five-day positivity rate to about 0.75% for all tests performed, which is well within public health guidelines.
No additional information had been added by Friday afternoon to the school’s testing dashboard, a public tally of all results.
The demand for tests as classes began Monday “was a lot higher than we anticipated,” university spokeswoman Robin Kaler said. That’s caused longer wait times for results — up to 48 hours — than the two to six hours officials have previously touted. In some instances, students and faculty have also needed to redo their tests because their saliva samples were “invalid,” restricting their access to university buildings.
On a CNBC appearance Friday morning, University of Illinois System President Tim Killeen said 284 people have tested positive at the school’s downstate campus. He said the testing program was “going really well” and that many of the new cases were among asymptomatic carriers.
“Since we’re testing twice a week, every week, we catch it, catch it, catch it,” Killeen said. “There’s no escape for this virus. We’re going to find you, and when we find you, we are going to make sure you can’t transmit from human to human.”
Those who test positive must go to their residence and self-isolate immediately, the school says.
UIUC had projected a rise in cases, spurred by students moving into residence halls earlier this month, and says it’s taken steps to provide quarantine and isolation spaces to curtail the spread of COVID-19. Other large universities unable to manage the virus have sent students home and reverted to online classes.
But the university’s testing dashboard can be confusing to navigate. The dashboard counts positive tests but does not track people, meaning the data includes individuals who have tested positive multiple times, Kaler said. The school is “working on how to distill the actual number of cases,” she said in an email.
The dashboard has also been slow to update due to the influx of data. Results from tests performed Monday were only published Wednesday morning, and Tuesday’s results were posted about 3:30 p.m. Thursday.
“For the first week or so, I expect it’s going to lag a day or two,” Kaler said. The results can’t be posted until all the tests are processed and loaded into the dashboard, she added.
Tests performed Monday were also taking about a day to turn around, Kaler said. UIUC officials have previously emphasized their saliva tests — which require test tubes but not nasal swabs and reagents — can be analyzed faster, in hours instead of days. The tests received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week.
The school had conducted 121,333 tests overall as of Tuesday.
Moving forward, UIUC will try to spread out testing times, asking students to go during slower periods on Wednesday and during the weekend, Kaler said. While students can drop by any of the campus’ 17 test sites, they are also assigned certain days by which they must complete a twice-weekly testing requirement.
In a Thursday email to students, faculty and staff, university administrators said they were making adjustments to improve the testing process based on feedback over the last week. The administrators said they will stop test reminder emails, since some said they led to confusion, and that they were working on a tool to show which testing locations are the least busy and at what times.
The email also said that “test results may require up to 48 hours.”
Dana Meyerson, a senior studying psychology, said she tried getting tested on campus Sunday, but the site closed earlier due to weekend hours. She said she stood in line for about 30 minutes but was turned away at 3 p.m. while she and others were still in line.
“That upset me a lot. I wish there were more testing sites open on the weekends,” said Meyerson, 23, of California. “I think it’s kind of silly they have such limited hours on weekends because that’s when people are free a lot.”
Meyerson, who’s living off campus, said she tried again Tuesday and completed her test at a different site. She said she only got her results Thursday — about 49 hours later — and they were “inconclusive” so she needs to go back and do it again.
Results are typically invalid or inconclusive due to the quality of the saliva sample, which could be affected by eating or drinking before the test. During the test, individuals must produce 0.5 ounces of saliva and drop it into a test tube so the contents can be analyzed for COVID-19.
Kaler said about 5% of tests since July 6 have been invalid, though those results do not show up on the public dashboard. UIUC is starting to offer alternative nasal tests to those who repeatedly get invalid results or who cannot produce a usable saliva sample.
Meyerson, a fifth-year senior, said she is “more impressed than I thought I would be” with the testing system, particularly with the ease of giving a saliva sample and the relatively quick turnaround for results. But she said she still worries about student behavior, and has seen parties and crowded scenes at the local bars.
Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, an associate professor of computer science, said he took a test Monday but lost access to his office and other campus buildings because his results also came back as “invalid/inconclusive,” according to a copy of the notification he provided.
Anyone trying to enter school buildings must show employees manning the doors that they have a recent negative test result through a smartphone app or with a printed document.
Fagen-Ulmschneider said he refrained from drinking water or eating for about an hour before getting tested but has since been told to try waiting two hours.
His first test on Monday only took about 10 minutes, but Fagen-Ulmschneider needed to go back and do another one. When he did so Wednesday afternoon, an employee told him the results would take one to two days, he said.
“I think there’s a lot of implementation questions that they are going to work through over these first couple of weeks,” he said. “They’ve made the testing so easy, though. Big ups to them. I thought this was going to be way more painful, but it really was just walk up and swipe your (university ID).”
That also presented a slight problem Thursday when the school’s medical web portal experienced technical difficulties for about an hour, Kaler said, making it difficult for people to swipe in at testing centers with their university IDs.
But overall, university leaders and local health officials have presented an optimistic evaluation of the campus data.
Since the dashboard data does not track individual cases, the campus communities’ true positivity is actually lower than the 0.75% it’s displaying, according to Awais Vaid, an epidemiologist and deputy administrator for the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District.
The health department and UIUC scientists used models to predict how many new cases would be identified when students returned, and the estimates of 200 to 300 new cases are holding up so far, Vaid said.
Since early student move-in began Aug. 16, there have been 535 positive tests, according to the dashboard data. That includes tests for faculty and staff, in addition to students, as well as repeated cases.
“We had planned for this. We had prepared for this,” Vaid said Wednesday afternoon. “Anticipating this big bump, we had hired additional contact tracers as well. As of right now, we have multiple shifts … going from about 8 in the morning to 9 at night, seven days a week, taking care of these positives.”
UIUC is offering a blend of remote and in-person classes this semester, with about a third being delivered face to face. The school anticipated about 30,000 to 35,000 students would return to campus, which is less than usual.
“Our plan was designed for frequent testing and quickly isolating and quarantining those who are/might be infected. We weren’t focused on keeping a daily count of active cases,” Kaler said in an email Thursday.
echerney@chicagotribune.com
