Greenwich Academy tests entire population, every week
Private school teams with Yale on new COVID screening method
GREENWICH — Every Tuesday morning, before the first class of the day begins, Greenwich Academy students, teachers and administrators are united in a sort of ritual.
A small vial in hand, each member of the school community — roughly 1,160 students and staff — produces a 1 to 1.5 milliliter sample of saliva.
The specimens are sent to Mirimus, Inc., a Brooklyn-based lab that has partnered with Yale University on a technique that allows for rapid COVID-19 test results for large groups.
“Initially, we started the process working with them in a very limited capacity, with 100 tests,” said Michelle Summers, Greenwich Academy’s director of finance and operations and, more recently, its COVID coordinator. “Now, we’re effectively testing the entire population — students, employees and contracted employees.”
Depositing spit into a small container is perhaps an unusual start to each Tuesday, but Head of School Molly King said it has given peace of mind to parents, students and staff and allowed the school to continue educating pupils in person, despite cases on the rise in Greenwich, Fairfield County and Connecticut.
Since March, when the pandemic started and students were forced off-campus into remote settings, King said she and her staff had been searching for ways to safely bring students back to school, where they can best be educated. At the time, and even now, RTPCR tests, which collect a molecular sample most commonly via
nasal or throat swabs, were the predominant method of diagnosing the virus. But for many of the school’s young students, the swab was too invasive. It also didn’t allow for testing large groups with timely results. Antigen tests, which also require a swab and produce results more quickly, were less reliable.
“In looking at different testing initiatives, we learned there is a whole lot of difference between PCR testing and the rapid antigen test,” King said. “There were issues of accuracy, access and affordability.”
So King and her team continued searching for a solution.
They soon learned of a new approach being tested at the Hackley School, a private prep school in Tarrytown, N.Y. The school, in partnership with Mirimus Labs and Yale, had begun PCR testing its entire population. But instead of the uncomfortable nasal swab, they were using saliva samples.
King and Summers were enticed because the test was noninvasive. But cost, too, was an important factor. According to Summers, the rate for a nasal swab test without insurance can range between $150 and $200. The saliva test, on the other hand, costs between $18 and $20 per person, making widespread testing more feasible.
“It likely would have been prohibitive to do the entire population every day at the higher rate,” Summers said. “It’s still a large expense to the school, but we feel like if this means we can be in-person the benefits outweigh the costs.”
King inquired with Mirimus about becoming a second test site for the method and shortly after the start of the fall semester, saliva collection began. First, it involved a small sample of the population. But in recent weeks it’s become a full-scale evaluation of the entire school community.
The pool testing, combined with daily screening of students and staff, as well as regular safety precautions, like mask wearing, social distancing and hand hygiene, has proven successful for the school.
Before the start of the semester, all Greenwich Academy students and staff were required to get swab tested. Those tests produced two positive results, King and Summers said. But since then, pool testing, now in its fifth week at the school, has turned up all negative results, they said.
“You have your daily symptomatic screening ... and then weekly pool testing,” King said. “The real goal is to surface your asymptomatic carriers, the ones you wouldn’t otherwise know about.”
Students are happier than ever to be back at school, said King, who’s been with Greenwich Academy for 17 years. And though there was some awkwardness in depositing the saliva sample in the early weeks, most staff and students are becoming expert.
Most importantly, despite cases rising elsewhere, the school has remained relatively unaffected, though King is very aware that as the pandemic drags on, more challenges await.
“That’s not to say that we haven’t had people in quarantine,” King said. “There has been a slight increase in the town of Greenwich and among school children. And so, those are two distinct things. We have not surfaced a positive test since pool testing. ... But no one has any illusions that we don’t have rough waters ahead.”