Husky Coronavirus Testing Team

In the summer of 2020, BBI faculty, including Drs. Helen Chu, Jay Shendure, Lea Starita, and Ana Weil, recognized the need to help the University of Washington community contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There was an urgent need for students, faculty, and staff to have simple, rapid, and accurate COVID-19 testing to help mitigate effects of the virus on all aspects of campus operations and members of the UW community. They began brainstorming with laboratory, clinical, and administrative staff, as well as collaborating with UW upper campus leadership, on an innovative plan to devise and implement the Husky Coronavirus Testing (HCT) program at all three UW campuses.

In announcing the program in September 2020, President Ana Mari Cauce said: :Widespread testing – especially of people who aren’t experiencing symptoms – is one important way to protect our entire community from COVID-19. Young people are just as likely to catch COVID-19 as older people, even if they are less likely to develop severe illness. People of all ages with underlying health conditions are at higher risk for developing severe illness and the long-term effects of COVID-19 illness are still unclear. The sooner we get the pandemic under control, the sooner we can return to a more ‘normal’ way of living, learning and working.”

More than two years later, the program continues at all three UW campuses.

Tell us why you are nominating this team

This nomination is being submitted under the :innovation” category because of several factors. First and foremost, the complexity of the program – including logistics, supplies, staffing, personal protective equipment (PPE), programming, communications/marketing, and integration with UW systems – demanded innovative thinking, computational creativity, coordination, and action. Second, there was an unprecedented urgency to the problem; By September of 2020, nearly 200,000 people in the United States already had died from the virus, and a vaccine would not be available to the public until December – three months later.

In addition, accessibility to testing was and continues to be a high priority for the HCT Team. The team has offered :walk-in” appointments since its first day. The program also constructed and provided delivery of kits to households of participants unable to come to campus due to illness or mobility restrictions. These accommodations have demanded innovation and collaboration across HCT Team management, operations, and administrative staff, and making revisions to procedures, thereby ensuring all members of the UW community have access to rapid and reliable testing.

Moreover, the HCT Team devised an innovative :swab” method to allow for testing of large numbers of UW campus samples, and created operating systems using sample collection kiosks, drop boxes, and courier-delivered swab kits to acquire samples for testing. This also enabled the acquisition of crucial sequencing data for tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants. The analyses of these data also informed local and state health policy experts on the evolution of the virus.

The HCT Team was not exempt from supply chain problems, but through creativity and innovation, members worked closely to overcome them. Such work has included:

• Creating new testing platforms that bypassed costly procedures and integrated high throughput swabs, thereby enabling labs to keep costs down during testing, as well as to meet increased testing volumes during surges.
• Improving forecasting methods to better prepare for surges of new infections.
  Automating ordering procedures for same and next day kit delivery to participants’ homes, including UW dormitories.

More than two years after HCT was launched, the program is being evaluated continuously, thereby allowing ongoing refinements and improvements, including: (a) new drop boxes designed as part of Year 3, incorporating lessons learned in durability and usability from Years 1 and 2; and (b) updated communications and graphics, emphasizing usability to convey study information more effectively.

A major obstacle the HCT Team overcame was the extreme demand for testing on campus during the Omicron surge of early 2022, when testing volumes tripled over just a few weeks. During January and February of this year, clinical, laboratory, technical, appropriately trained administrative, and others were mobilized to work at UW testing kiosks and the BBI laboratory to ensure that the UW community had access to rapid and reliable testing. As a result, no one requesting a test was turned away, despite up to wait time of seven days at some community testing sites in Seattle during that time.

What makes this nominee worthy of the DSA?

HCT is integral to the UW’s COVID-19 Prevention Plan. Over the past two-plus years, the HCT Team has dramatically impacted the entire UW community – approximately 50,000 students and nearly 60,000 employees – by identifying individuals positive for the virus and its variants, thus, allowing for the isolation of infected individuals to prevent further spread.

In addition to PCR testing, HCT testing stations make UW-provided rapid antigen self-test kits available to all in the UW community. The team also uses all-electronic enrollment and daily assessments – by text or email – of symptoms and other risk factors for infection, and provides guidance to participants about the need for testing based on participants’ responses. Also, through all-electronic daily communications, the HCT Team tracks symptoms during and after infections to assess for long COVID within the UW community, as well as tracking re-infections and the consistency between PCR and rapid antigen testing.

Furthermore, the HCT Team has collaborated on six peer-reviewed manuscripts and has contributed significantly to the knowledge of the pandemic globally through these academic papers, as well as through conferences, both in the U.S. and internationally. Its members work with other leaders in the academic, government, and public health sectors on the planning for mitigating future viral outbreaks.

In addition to BBI and the laboratories of Drs. Helen Chu, Jay Shendure, and Lea Starita, the UW Environmental Health and Safety Department played a vital role by contacting individuals testing positive to help mitigate ongoing transmission of the virus in the UW community.

As of 1 December 2022, the HCT Team has tested and analyzed 231,416 samples for return of results to participants, and sequenced 3,880 samples for tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants.

—Dean Owen, Communications Director, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine

Meet the team:

• Zack Acker (he/him), Manager of Program Operations, Genome Sciences, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Julia Catherine Bennett (she/her), Graduate Research Assistant, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine; Graduate Student, Epidemiology, School of Public Health
• Sabrina Best (she/her), Research Scientist/Engineer I, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Amanda Morgan Casto (she/her), Acting Assistant Professor, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine
• Christian Frazar (he/him), Lead Research Scientist, Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
• Luis Gamboa (he/him), Research Scientist II, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Sarah Heidl (she/her), Research Scientist, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Natalie K. Lo (she/her), Director of Program Operations, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine
• Kyle Luiten (he/him), Research Consultant, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine
• Kathryn McCaffrey (she/her), Research Coordinator, Genome Sciences, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Evan McDermot (he/him), Research Scientist/Engineer II, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Devon McDonald (she/her), Research Coordinator, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine
• Jordan Opsahl (she/her), Research Supervisor, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Brian Pfau (he/him), Research Analyst, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• David Reinhart (he/him), Senior Software Engineer, Genome Sciences, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Leslie Rodriguez-Salas (she/her), Research Supervisor/RSE II, Advanced Technology Lab, Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine
• Erica Ryke (she/her), Sequencing Lead and Research Scientist/Engineer III, Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
• Sanjay Srivatsan (he/him), Postdoctoral Fellow, Genome Sciences, School of Medicine
• Caitlin Wolf (she/her), Program Manager, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine
• Tessa Wright (she/they), Research Coordinator, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, UW Medicine