The stakes were so high, and the need so great, that last week a University of Washington lab issued an extraordinary call for help.
The medical-school dean, Paul Ramsey, wrote in an email to university researchers that he was seeking volunteers — grad students, postdocs, lab techs, anybody — who could spend a week processing tests for Covid-19, the deadly disease sweeping the globe. Not everything had been worked out — for instance, how much the volunteers would be paid.
“In order to meet the demand for testing,” Ramsey wrote, “we need to rapidly and immediately add staff for this work.”
The new coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, had already been circulating in the Seattle area for weeks, with 488 confirmed cases as of Monday, and 43 deaths. Meanwhile, the U.S. health-care system has struggled to keep up with the demand for coronavirus tests. Such tests, typically supplied by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, remain in short supply relative to the scope of the outbreak in the United States, hampering public-health officials’ understanding of the virus’s spread, and how to respond.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
University medical centers have stepped in to fill the void, taking matters into their own hands and in some cases designing Covid-19 tests of their own. The University of Washington, the Johns Hopkins University, and Stanford University are among the institutions that have used tests of their own design to begin screening patients. Others are working on tests and seeking approval.
The work has proved to be an extraordinary lift for the researchers, who are also rushing to study the virus. Scientists at Johns Hopkins, for example, who have been tracking the virus’s spread, released a study that shows that coronavirus symptoms tend to start about five days after exposure. And at the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers are studying the effectiveness of screening travelers to reduce the contagion.
University scientists are now on the front lines of the struggle to mitigate the coronavirus, said Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science and its associated journals, and a former university administrator. “Colleges need to prioritize the safety and success of the people who have their pipettes in their hand and are fighting this battle,” he said. “This could be a great validation of how important it is that we have this extraordinary academic-science infrastructure in this country.”
‘It’s Happening!’
At the University of Washington, students and staff members were eager to pitch in. Erin Yang, a graduate student in biochemistry, was beginning to feel as if her skills were going to waste on her own research, which isn’t related to coronavirus. Then came Dean Ramsey’s email. “I was like, Ahh! It’s happening!” she recalled. “I felt like, Wow, finally the university is responding in a way that I could do something.”
Academic medical centers have pools of people ready to help with Covid-19 testing, said John T. Slattery, vice dean for research and graduate education at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine: “If you ski, you just clip into your bindings and do it. You’re going.”
More than 130 people applied to help within a day of the dean’s callout, said Geoffrey S. Baird, acting chair of laboratory medicine. The researchers who are selected will do the nuts-and-bolts work: “getting samples in the door, making sure we have all the information right,” and that it’s properly logged into the computer system, Baird said. “Those tasks can be done by nonexperts in the field who are nonetheless scientists.”
“I am planning on using this type of approach for months, if needed,” he said. “I’m not going to slow down. We’re hoping to use small amounts of time from lots of people.”
Baird spoke quickly and frantically on Friday, saying he had time for only a 15-minute phone call because he was “putting out fires like you wouldn’t believe.” On Thursday his lab tested 1,600 samples, he said. The University of Washington’s virology lab tweeted on Monday that it was testing specimens from about 2,000 people per day.
Still operating at full capacity - testing specimens from ~2000 people/day (mostly from Western WA) @UWVirology @UWMedicine. ~6.5% positive on 3/15. More capacity coming Wednesday or Thursday.
— UW Virology (@UWVirology) March 17, 2020
In the Nebraska Public Health Laboratory, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Peter C. Iwen and his staff of four are running tests 12 hours a day on weekdays, and one run on weekends. The laboratory was one of the first in the nation to be cleared to do coronavirus tests, having been responsible for tracking 57 American citizens who had been evacuated in early February from Hubei Province, China, where the virus originated.
A lab at the U. of Nebraska at Omaha was ‘the only game in town in the whole state.’
Iwen’s lab received its testing kit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the same day that the evacuees touched down in Omaha, he said. Until last week, Iwen’s lab had been “the only game in town in the whole state,” he said. “The public-health laboratory is getting overwhelmed with requests for testing.”
Now the University of Nebraska’s affiliated hospital is itself seeking approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to run tests. Meanwhile, under the FDA’s new, more-flexible rules, the hospital may test patients during a 15-day grace period, until the FDA gives its final go-ahead. The approval will help take some of the load off the Nebraska Public Health Lab.
Adrenaline was running high in the lab at first, Iwen said, but now his people are getting tired. He shoos his staff members out at night because he doesn’t want them to burn out.
Iwen and Baird may soon get more help. Private testing companies have slowly been increasing their capacities. Soon the limiting factor on testing in the United States will no longer be labs’ capacity to run them, but the availability of supplies, such as critical chemicals, tweeted Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
In fact, labs are already having trouble obtaining enough supplies. Baird told The Chronicle that his lab was running out of such materials on Friday, and that he had put a call out to biotech labs across the state, saying he would personally pick up the supplies if he had to.
Yang herself soon heard that the University of Washington had enough willing hands, for now. The night after she sent in her CV, she got a reply saying that there were enough volunteers but that she might be called in the future. She said she was heartened by the university science community’s response to the medical center’s call for help.
“The email felt,” she wrote to The Chronicle, “like the most hopeful, positively satisfying waitlist I have ever gotten.”
Iwen, too, had seen Ramsey’s email, which scientists passed along, mostly as an example intended to lift spirits. For him, however, it was a sign of how bad UW Medicine expected things to get.
“It made me sick,” he said. “This sounds like the apocalypse.”
