Covid-19 Pooled Testing

PROBLEM: Covid-19 caused a nationwide school shutdown, and while private schools, charter schools, and select public school districts were able to offer in-person or hybrid learning, the majority of public school districts went fully remote. This further exacerbated longstanding racial and socioeconomic divides, with lower income districts and majority minority districts more likely to be fully remote. Likewise, roughly one third of low-income households did not have high-speed internet at home, compared to just 6% of households earning $75,000 or more. The longer schools were unable to open their doors, the wider this opportunity and achievement gap would be.

PARTNERS: We knew that we needed to find a way to allow students to get back in school safely, and that would require affordable and reliable Covid-19 testing. We partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Secondary Education (DESE), Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to develop and implement a new testing protocol that enabled students across Massachusetts to get back into the classroom.

SOLUTION: After conducting extensive research and speaking with epidemiologists, industry professionals, and school leaders - we built up a robust knowledge base and developed a strategic return-to-school playbook. We concluded that, along with proper social distancing and hygiene protocols, schools could successfully implement a safe and effective pooled testing program in order to bring students back. Pooling samples involves mixing ten samples together in a "batch" or pooled sample, and then testing the entire batch together with a single diagnostic test. If the test is negative, all patients in the pool are cleared. If the test is positive, all patients in the pool are individually tested to identify the positive individual. This creates a cost-effective way to test all students on a weekly basis. In January 2021, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announced a pilot of this program in several school districts, and by March, Massachusetts was the first state in the country implementing a statewide weekly pooled surveillance testing solution for all K-12 students, enabling students to return to in-person learning.

ADOPTION: By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, 2,300 Massachusetts public schools were enrolled in the weekly pooled testing program, and the program had already identified over 2,500 cases of COVID-19 and helped preserve over 200,000 in-person school days through an innovative “Test & Stay” protocol. This work caught the attention of other states trying to solve these same issues, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) contacted us about scaling our work nationally. We built a new, national toolkit for the CDC and joined federal officials in training seminars with school leaders around the country.