While the sensitivity of pooled testing has improved over the course of the pandemic, CEO Scott Storrer of the diagnostics company Affinity Empowering said only a handful of providers can promise large-scale pooled testing that’s both accurate and reported via reliable digital platforms.
“Everybody and their brother is going to tell you that they do pool testing, but that’s a myth. Right now, there are only a handful of reference labs in the country that are able to do pooling,” he said, adding that Affinity’s partnership with diagnostics lab Eurofins can process up to 24 samples in a pool, whereas many others can process around five.
According to a company news release, Affinity was able to quickly increase its capacity for back-to-school testing due to its partnerships with over 100 diagnostics labs and having over 20 years of experience with occupational health services. Today, the company says it offers COVID-19 diagnostics services to about 750,000 customers and processes about 5,000 test results per day for hundreds of schools, higher education institutions, employers and the U.S. Department of Defense.
“We’re not a startup, so we didn’t rush into COVID testing to chase what I call the ‘COVID gold rush.' We needed to provide this type of testing immediately to our employer customers last March," he said, touching on the influx of new test providers during the pandemic that's left schools and universities with many companies to choose from in the COVID-19 market.
Affinity offers a variety of COVID-19 testing options, including PCR testing, antigen testing and antibody testing. For its back-to-school pooled testing program, the company provides on-site, mobile, fixed location and kiosk-based collection services for schools and universities. According to Storrer, Affinity’s pool tests can drive costs down to about $7 per individual and deliver results to endpoint users within 16 hours.
Officials at Indiana-based DePauw University, the company’s flagship institution, say they’ve received test results through Affinity’s Assure platform often within about 15 hours, while other test platforms used before the 2020-21 school year have delivered results within two or three days.
“Assure presents itself on an Android, iPhone or any smart technology that you’re using. It presents just like an app, yet much more secure,” Storrer said. “When you are storing millions of data points, you can’t just place trust in an app. You just have too much sideways interruption with our good friends in China and Russia that can interfere with apps, whereas on a platform [like ours], you’re much more protected.”
The need to make quick decisions in response to outbreaks over the past year has been among the main concerns of education and government officials in Indiana, which reported more than 5,000 new COVID-19 cases amid a "second surge" of infections in November 2020.
Against this backdrop elsewhere in the state, DePauw University's Associate Vice President for Campus Wellness Stevie Baker-Watson said the university was able to maintain in-person events and courses this year, partly due to the help of Affinity's testing services and platform.
“We knew the key for us to be able to be open, have in-person classes and give our students some semblance of a college life [was] we were going to have to be able to test our community and get those test results back quickly,” she said.
“The fact that we can say to a student, ‘We’re going to test you today on Wednesday, and by tomorrow morning, we’re going to know which direction we’re going to take’ has been huge.”
Baker-Watson, who also directs the university's athletics programs, said DePauw recently recorded close to 1,200 students on campus and has resumed events for over 20 athletics programs through the help of their COVID-19 monitoring capabilities. She said the company allows for constant communication regarding results, keeping administrators such as herself in the loop to make quick decisions in response to a potential outbreak.
“A lot of the testing platforms we looked at either had a clunky type of system where I might have results produced in one type of way, like an Excel document where I had to upload it somewhere else, or they had a system where the test results weren’t shared with me who’s actually ordering the test, but only shared with the person being administered,” she said.
“With someone who is responsible for the health and welfare of campus, that was really challenging because theoretically, if I didn’t have the test results coming to me, I could have somebody test positive and be completely unaware of that.”
Baker-Watson said DePauw will require students to get vaccinated for COVID-19 ahead of the coming fall semester, adding that roughly 75 percent of the student body has already received some type of vaccine.
Though vaccines have started to make their way into the general population, she said, COVID-19 testing will likely remain a fixture for the foreseeable future, particularly among athletes in close contact with one another. She cited a mysterious outbreak recently among New York Yankees players who had been vaccinated for the virus as an example of why testing will remain crucial in the months to come.
“It’s never static,” she said of the ongoing public health crisis.
