There is hope

We’re in September now, our second full week of classes. The fatalistic, when-will-the-shoe-drop negativity is slowly being replaced by hope. Hope that this can be sustainable, that we can find a way to keep our students here on campus, safely, for the entirety of the planned Fall 2020 semester, which is until Thanksgiving. Will it happen? We still don’t know for sure. But, at least in my mind, there is hope.

Here’s why: Surveillance testing. This week, like some other colleges, Marist has started large randomized testing of the campus, using a simple saliva screening test. At the risk of sounding like a fool who pretends to understand the science: Large samples of the Marist population – students, faculty, staff – can be tested using a pooled method. Each pool contains about 12 individuals. Their saliva samples are gathered together as one, which is tested. If that pooled sample comes back negative, all individuals in the sample pool are presumed negative. It’s a very efficient way to speed up the lab analysis process, as opposed to hundreds or thousands of individual tests. If a pooled sample comes back positive, then all 12 (or how many) individuals in that pool have to be tested using the up-the-nose PCR method (which is not nearly as invasive as it once was), to determine who among the pool was positive. Once the positive result is determined, everyone else in the pool is off the hook, presumed negative.

There’s more to it, involving the complex processes of contact tracing and quarantining. I won’t go into that, because mostly I don’t fully understand it. But anyway, this surveillance testing will enable us to test, eventually, everybody that populates this campus. Multiple times! More data is good data. By knowing who is or may be positive, we might just be able to get a handle on this pandemic.

And oh, if you’re looking for really good news? Go to Wuhan, China, where this thing started late last year. They have pretty much eradicated the virus and are returning to a fully “normal” life – kids back to school, adults back to work, etc. In less than a year. We’ve been told all along that “hope is not a strategy,” but now hope may actually be a reality.