Companies, universities, and other large organizations and institutions that are conducting regular COVID-19 testing among their members should consider expanding their testing efforts to nearby communities to better control the spread of the virus, according to new research co-led by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The study, which is a preprint and has not yet been published in a scientific journal, found that institutions that expand testing services to the surrounding community could reduce the number of COVID-19 cases among their members by as much as 25 percent.
“If you’ve been in enough outbreaks you just understand that testing in a box doesn’t makes sense. These things are communicable, and they’re coming in from the community,” study author Pardis Sabeti, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Chan School and a member of the Broad Institute, said in a March 24, 2021, New York Times article. “An outbreak is an opportunity to buy a lot of community good will, or to burn a lot of community good will.”
Read the New York Times article: Why It Pays to Think Outside the Box on Coronavirus Tests