Welcome!
Our goal is to get early detection surveillance going at a large scale in the United States. The road we envision is as follows:
Phase 1. Pursue two parallel tracks centered on providing information and education to the appropriate stakeholders and helping to shepherd through a modest size implementation (nursing home, campus building, campus, K-12 school, kids summer camp).
Track 1. Local implementation at a lab and a site.
Track 2. Getting general awareness and policy awareness of what is possible with a goal of driving movement from the top.
Phase 2.
Amplify the implementation accomplished in phase 1 along with providing thorough information for duplicating the result to allow large scale implementation.
Below are a list of ways you can help. If you have questions/comments feel free to email us at covidsampling@gmail.com.
Pooling solves the issue of both testing capacity and affordability for implementing early detection surveillance within facilities such as assisted living facilities, jails and other vulnerable populations. We should all be advocating for making these resources available to those populations.
Please take a moment to communicate to your elected representatives along with your local policy makers that this is a need that can be met.
You can refer people to this website and/or to this video where the ideas are explained. The key component to stress is that the cost would be less than $5 dollars a day per person to provide this kind of surveillance.
The biggest potential for widespread adoption of pooling are research labs at Universities. This is because the Universities themselves have a vested interest in testing their populations efficiently and all Universities are busy coming up with "reopening" plans for this fall. Any University that converts their lab to be able to pool will have excess capacity that can be used to protect others in the community.
We urge you to take a moment to reach out to your alma mater and refer them to the information on this website and/or to this video where the ideas are explained. Because University's are very conscious of what other universities are offering, it is worth mentioning that Stanford currently has plans to implement an early detection system for their population using pooled testing.
Here is a sample letter to use if you'd like.