WASHINGTON — George Washington University (GW) has developed an in-house coronavirus test conducted in its new COVID-19 laboratory in an effort to keep their school community safe during the pandemic.
The free on-campus coronavirus testing gives results within 24 to 48 hours instead of the days or weeks for test results to return from outside laboratories. The university implemented this launch as an additional safeguard to help prevent outbreaks on their campus.
The university said the test is fast, accurate and will go along with case investigations to control and contain positive COVID-19 cases within their school community and the D.C. area.
"We have a team called our campus COVID support team that's able to rapidly identify those individuals who do test positive, and to make sure that we get all of the information to them about how to safely go into isolation," Dr. Amanda Castel, an epidemiology professor, said.
GW's COVID-19 tests use a technique called polymerase chain reaction to detect genetic material from the virus that causes coronavirus, school officials said. They say this powerful method is highly accurate.
"We're not relying on commercial lab testing, which sometimes can take more than a week to get results back," Castel said. "But within 24 to 48 hours, we can act and we can try to mitigate the spread of COVID on our campus and in our community.”
The free testing has been put in place for the limited number of students, staff and faculty that are on campus for the fall semester. The testing will be able to cover members of the community if the campus is able to fully re-open by spring 2021, school officials said.
For the start of the fall semester, all on-campus GW students, faculty and staff were required to get a COVID test before starting work or school, school officials said. Now with the available on-campus testing, members of the school community that are on campus must get weekly COVID-19 tests and continue to monitor symptoms daily.
"Given the spread of COVID-19 by people who have few to no symptoms and the difficulty in accessing testing from private labs, GW concluded in April that we should develop our own testing capacity," Lynn Goldman, Dean of the GW Milken Insitutue School of Public Health, said. "GW's faculty and staff worked round the clock to create an automated high-capacity COVID-19 diagnostic test, obtain regulatory approvals, build the new laboratory and set up testing sites on campus."
GW joins many other universities and institutions across the nation that have had to hold classes online for the fall semester, but a GW spokesperson said about 500 students are on campus. Some laboratory, arts and clinical training courses remain on-campus. School officials said this new rapid test is an important first step in the eventual reopening of campus.
GW conducted 7,489 tests and developed a COVID-19 Testing Dashboard that updates the testing and results on a daily basis, school officials said. As of Monday, 10 people have tested positive. The tests are available at the Foggy Bottom campus and the Virginia Science and Technology Campus in Ashburn.
