COVID-19 cases among students continue to rise as UK begins new forms of testing
Positive COVID-19 cases continued to rise among University of Kentucky students — making up nearly half of the city’s newly reported cases on Friday.
Of Lexington’s 111 new cases, 50 were among UK students, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department reported. Since Aug. 29, the department has reported nearly 399 new cases among students and 856 cases since Aug. 3 when UK began its initial testing strategy.
According to UK’s COVID-19 dashboard — which lags behind health department data — there are 459 active student cases and 358 recovered cases as of Tuesday. The university reported 94 students in isolation, with 69 of them residing in the on-campus isolation dorm and another 25 fraternity and sorority students isolated in their houses. Isolation dorms were at 41 percent capacity.
The university began its initial tests for wastewater screening of on-campus residential facilities this week, UK President Eli Capilouto announced in an email to campus on Thursday. The possibility for wastewater testing was first mentioned in the university’s reopening playbook in June. In addition, the university will maintain an outdoor site on the lawn between The 90 dining facility and the William T. Young Library where asymptomatic students can get tested.
The testing site, operated by the UK-hired WildHealth, will be open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., every day of the week.
The site open to all asymptomatic students comes after the university mandated that all fraternity and sorority students be retested nearly two weeks ago. Those students were retested after they registered a higher positivity rate compared to the rest of the student population in the university’s first round of testing all on-campus students.
Symptomatic students are encouraged to get tested through the university’s health system, not the outdoor facility.
How does UK’s wastewater testing work?
The university is hoping to use the wastewater testing to detect outbreaks before they become unmanageable — much like what the University of Arizona accomplished in late August, said Dr. Robert DiPaola, the team lead of the university’s START work group, That group is charged with developing strategies for limiting the spread of COVID-19 at UK.
“It’s not the most typical process, but it’s something that, based on the evidence, makes sense,” DiPaola said.
The system starts with a testing sampler, a device installed in the subterranean “flow” away from dorms, Greek housing or any residential facility on campus.
“You set it up so that it’s only that facility,” DiPaola said. “So you’re not struggling to figure out which one to test next.”
Deep beneath manhole covers, the device captures samples from the sewage water at set intervals over an extended period of time, depending on how the device is installed. DiPaola, who is also the dean of the college of medicine, said the system will likely collect samples at the times of day when there’s a lot of toilet flushing and bathroom use, like in morning hours.
Samples will be collected and run through testing processes similar to those used to get positive and negative results from nasal swab tests. If the sewage water comes up positive, then university officials know that there’s likely at least one or more COVID-19-positive residents in the building.
The university could then target its larger testing strategy on the building, and every resident would be retested with swabs. Those positive could be moved to isolation facilities and those near them would go into quarantine in their residences.
“These seem pretty reliable,” DiPaola said. “There’s a least one or more people in these residential facilities that are using the bathrooms and so forth that are positive with COVID.”
Wastewater testing as an early-warning system
In the University of Arizona’s widely circulated results, the university quickly retested a 311-student dorm after it found evidence of COVID-19 in sewage. The testing turned up two asymptomatic cases who had no previous idea they were positive, the Washington Post reported last week.
Viral RNA can be found in bodily waste even before someone became symptomatic, said Dr. Becky Dutch, a UK virology expert and department chair for the university’s molecular and cellular biochemistry department, in a Facebook Live event on Thursday.
“You’re infectious before your symptoms come on,” Dutch said. “The wastewater ... can pick that up even earlier.”
In the case of a sorority or fraternity house, where tight-quartered living spaces and shared bathrooms have likely contributed to the spread of COVID-19, a house that suddenly began registering the virus in its wastewater could be tested very quickly, Dutch said.
The university’s wastewater testing has begun on Ingels Hall this week, the university’s main isolation dorm for COVID-positive students, as a sort of control group, said DiPaola. Results gathered from that dorm will be used to calibrate future wastewater tests across the campus.
“We’ll go ahead and go from residential facility to residential facility,” DiPaola said. “We’ll be making decisions on the initial results.”
Wastewater testing would not occur at a building like the UK student center, where students commonly pass through but don’t live in the space.
DiPaola said he didn’t have exact cost figure for the system, but he estimated that the retesting of students after a wastewater screening would be costlier than the wastewater tests.
DiPaola said wastewater screening is more cost efficient than retesting the entire student body multiple times.
This story was originally published September 4, 2020 at 10:07 AM.