Over the fall semester, UConn has administered or tracked more than 42,000 COVID-19 individual and surveillance tests among its student body, helping it successfully complete the semester’s in-person portion when many other schools had to send students home early.
For the spring semester, UConn will accelerate its work to include about 75,000 tests, expanding its testing strategy in a way that measures the health of the entire on-campus student population every day through wastewater monitoring, pooled surveillance, and individual testing.
UConn is one of few institutions nationwide using all three testing approaches combined, which hedges against potential shortages of individual tests and provides a more comprehensive measure of campus health than otherwise possible. Now, other institutions are starting to notice and hoping to emulate its work.