holidays, seeing family and friends, increasing exposure opportunities. Our overall positivity rate remains well below the county and state average, but it’s still higher than we want. Sarah Latham, our vice chancellor for Business and Administrative Services, issued a campus COVID update Thursday that provides a broad overview.
A positive development is the switch we have made at our diagnostic lab to “pool test” samples taken as part of our campus asymptomatic testing program. We started that Jan. 4. It now puts us in a position to routinely test more than 1,000 students and staff per day. In this process, individual test samples are combined. When a combined pool registers positive, individual samples are tested to identify the positives. We’ve aspired to this method since opening the lab six months ago, but first needed to become efficient handling clinical samples and validating processes, essentially learning to walk before we could run. We now have the ability to handle as many as 1,500 tests per day, which is a huge plus for our campus and the greater community.
The virus variant you’ve been hearing about is a mutation that spreads more easily than the typical COVID-19 strain. The variant was first isolated in the U.K., and we’re now seeing it spread throughout the U.S. Our current test will detect the new variant as a positive, but will not reveal whether any of our positives are specifically the new variant. However, our campus has a long history in genomics and in genomic data analysis, and sequencing efforts are underway that will allow us to determine if the variant is present. Hopefully that will be soon.
The good news is that fending off the variant, which is no more deadly than the typical virus, takes no more effort than defending ourselves against the others: Practice social distancing, wear face coverings when in close contact with others, keep your social circles tight, and get tested if you believe you may be infected.
John MacMillan is associate vice chancellor for research and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSC.
