By the time graduate students began returning to the UC Davis campus in mid-September, the university was prepared with its own program of testing, contact tracing and quarantining to limit outbreaks.
Months later, the university has been able to expand its bubble to include the entire city of Davis.
“The bugs don’t stop at the border of campus,” said Dr. Brad Pollock, Professor and chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at UC Davis Health, who directs the Healthy Davis project.
He says the university, the City of Davis and Yolo County have all stepped up their efforts to make it possible.
“Much to the credit of our genome center, we set up a very large scale testing platform. This is basically asymptomatic testing using saliva and also deploying the PCR method,” explained Dr. Pollock.
The university is known for its agriculture and biotech programs and adapted a testing method that has previously been used in plant pathology.
“It uses this little ribbon tape and little micro wells, plastic micro wells on each of these PCR reactions so you have much less material needed and it can do a lot more volume of testing much more efficiently.”
The university is offering the tests for free to all students, staff or city residents who are not experiencing any symptoms, because asymptomatic people are most likely to spread the virus without knowing it.
“We’ve actually detected hundreds of people being infected that were asymptomatic,” he said.
Apartment and hotel owners are offering free rooms to people who need to isolate or quarantine.
But still, Dr. Pollack said, “there is an expression which is ‘you can’t test your way out of an epidemic,’ and that’s true.”
No matter how advanced or effective the university’s technology is, that will not be enough to stop the pandemic on its own.
Dr. Pollack says a major component of the program was a communication campaign to educate people and encourage them to continue behaviors like masking, hand hygiene and social distancing.
“Those behaviors really have a big impact on epidemics.”
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