Weekly Saliva Tests Planned For Schools Reopening

Every teacher, lunch lady, custodian and high school student would take a weekly test to determine whether they have caught Covid-19 — without costing schools, workers or families a cent.

Yale professor Nathan Grubaugh revealed that proposal for weekly saliva testing at Monday night’s Board of Education meeting.

“It almost sounds too good to be true, but I’m an optimist. I like what I’m hearing,” said board member Larry Conaway. ​“I will take a saliva test over swabbing all day long.”

Grubaugh is one of two Yale School of Public Health assistant professors who helped develop SalivaDirect, which got an emergency stamp of approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August.

Part of the vision for the new SARS-CoV‑2 testing method was to make it cheap enough for schools to use it to reopen. Grubaugh brought plans for outside funding as well from the organization Testing For America. He said that the organization had not finalized a commitment to cover the costs of the tests at NHPS but that news was likely by the end of the week.

Frequent testing — of everyone within a school when possible — is one of the best ways to contain a Covid-19 outbreak, as area universities have learned. Yale tests all undergraduates two times a week and seems to have contained an outbreak among its hockey players. Meanwhile, the University of New Haven tests a random sample of its students and had to move all classes online after a spike in cases. The price of testing all students is high though; Yale has spent $25 million on tests, personal protective equipment and other safety measures.

The New Haven Board of Education asked for Covid-19 tests as a prerequisite to reopening schools. The request has proven to be legally and financially challenging. Schools cannot require students to get tested for the virus because of the parameters around their legal right to attend school. Schools can require employees get tested but they have to negotiate the hows of cost, etc with the workers’ unions.

So far, the city health department has made swab-based Covid-19 testing available in all neighborhoods so students and staff can get check their status before they return to school buildings for in-person classes on Nov. 9.

Tuesday, Friday Tests

Teachers and all other school staff would be the first ones to take the weekly SalivaDirect tests at school. They would spit into a tube that would then head to Mirimus Clinical Labs, one of three labs Yale is working with to process the test.

The tests would happen on Tuesday and Friday and the results would come back the next day. Teachers and students would not be in school buildings on either Wednesday or Saturday, giving the district enough time to decide who would need to quarantine in the case of a positive result.

High school students taking in-person classes would be the next group to start the weekly tests. After opting into the program, students would take their tests on Tuesday or Friday, based on whether they take in-person classes on Monday and Tuesday or Thursday and Friday.

The testing team would then try one-time tests with younger students at a few schools to check whether testing all younger students weekly is doable.

“We are seeing in other systems that screening can drive down cases. I’m really excited about trying to implement that here,” Grubaugh said.

Grubaugh said that he does not have financial ties to the tests. He does have a daughter attending kindergarten in New Haven Public Schools.

“I can tell you my 5‑year-old is an expert at spitting. And she’s pretty good at spitting into a tube,” Grubaugh said.

Testing For America is interested in covering the costs of tests through the end of 2020. After that, the team would assess how well the testing system worked and what funding is available to continue testing in the spring semester.

Grubaugh said that testing all school staff for 20 weeks would cost $500,000. Expanding the program to all high school students or all students would increase the cost to $1,070,000 and $2.6 million, respectively.

The turnaround time and cost of each test is relatively low, partially because Mirimus processes the samples in batches of 24. If the batch comes back as Covid-positive, the lab then tests each sample individually, Grubaugh explained.

Testing For America has focused on helping historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Delaware State University, where twice-weekly tests have turned up no Covid-19 cases caught at school. Now it is extending that help to public schools with high racial and ethnic diversity, Grubaugh said.

Data Privacy

Board of Education members checked whether this ​“too good to be true” idea has a catch. Board member and pediatrician Tamiko Jackson-McArthur asked Grubaugh and the city health department to make sure they were following the district’s data collection policy.

New Haven Health Department Director Maritza Bond assured Jackson-McArthur that they would follow the policy.

“I want to reiterate what Dr. Jackson said. We spent six to eight months creating a policy around student data when we dealt with another program that came out of Yale,” said board member Darnell Goldson.

That study focused on struggling readers in New Haven schools. The board balked when they learned the study was collecting student DNA, given the U.S. history of medical abuse of African Americans, and decided that they needed a better policy around student data privacy.

Parent and teacher concern that in-person classes could cause an outbreak of Covid-19 cases in schools flared back up at this week’s board meeting. The parent and teacher group New Haven Public Schools Advocates asked the board for clear guidance on how many cases would shut down schools. In the public comment period before the presentation on the saliva tests, the group emphasized that the district should use data for those thresholds that paints a clear picture of local risk.