UC San Diego, San Diego State granted $10 million for testing in underserved areas.
Universities to bring COVID-19 tests to underserved areas
San Diego’s two largest universities have scored $10 million in government funding to ensure that COVID-19 testing efforts don’t leave behind communities that have been deeply affected by the pandemic.
UC San Diego and San Diego State University received $5 million apiece and are among 32 institutions awarded $234 million by the National Institutes of Health.
The federal funding is a response to stark evidence that the pandemic has hit communities of color hardest. Blacks, Latinos and other minorities are more likely to get COVID-19 than White Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and are more likely to end up in the hospital or die from the disease.
That trend holds true in San Diego, too. Hispanics or Latinos, which make up onethird of the county, account for around 60 percent of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. And while 5.3 percent of COVID-19 tests have come back positive in San Diego County, that rate balloons to 13.3 percent in the border region of San Ysidro. UCSD plans to work with San Ysidro Health to administer free COVID-19 testing at San Ysidro Maternal and Child Health Center. While the program’s focus will be to test pregnant women and children, friends and family members can also get tested at the health center — regardless of whether they have COVID-19 symptoms.
UCSD will process samples in its lab, which can run up to 6,000 samples a day and return results within four hours. But that technological wizardry won’t do any good unless the community is on board with the testing program, says Dr. Louise Laurent, one of the directors of the UCSD effort.
“We are very prepared to listen and not presume that we have all the answers,” said Laurent, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology. “We have tools, but it’s really important to apply those tools in a sensitive, efficient and acceptable way.”
That’s why UCSD plans to spend the next three months working with com
munity organizations to share its testing plan, solicit feedback and make any needed adjustments. Once the effort begins in earnest, researchers will monitor testing rates at the maternal and child health center over the next two years.
SDSU is taking a different tack: Rather than ask the community to come to a stationary testing site, researchers will set up pop-up sites in the areas where COVID-19 testing is most needed.
It’s a strategy that has worked well for HIV testing in sub-Saharan Africa, says Susan Kiene, a global health expert and leader of the SDSU program.
“Mobile, community
based testing offers more f lexibility, which can help us address some of the barriers that are associated with some of the other testing options,” Kiene said.
SDSU is partnering with nine community health organizations that routinely work with underserved populations, including Alliance Health Clinic, Casa Familiar and the San Diego County Promotores Coalition.
The plan is to set up temporary testing sites in communities where COVID-19 rates are high but testing access has been limited, with the goal of reaching Latino, Black, Filipino and Arabicspeaking populations. Testing sites would be in places such as church parking lots or food distribution centers.
Anyone who comes to
these sites can get tested, but the focus will be on those without COVID-19 symptoms who are at risk of being exposed to the virus based on where they work and whom they’ve contacted. The CDC estimates that half of all COVID-19 transmission comes from those who don’t have symptoms.
SDSU will use a COVID-19 test made by San Diego biotech Quidel, which returns results within 15 minutes, to help participants quickly know whether to quarantine or alert close contacts. So-called antigen tests, which detect viral proteins, are not as sensitive as tried-and-true molecular tests, which detect a virus’ genetic material, so any positive test result will be confirmed with a molecular test. Kiene hopes that testing will
begin within the next three weeks, and expects to conduct 42,000 tests within the next 14 months.
Most of the $5 million awarded to each university will pay for testing. Quidel has stated that its test costs in the “$20 range.” And Laurent says the UCSD team’s tests cost well below $50 a test, though she wouldn’t provide an exact price.
Both Kiene and Laurent stressed that the community engagement central to both testing efforts will be key to the next phase of quelling the pandemic — making sure that a COVID-19 vaccine is available to all, and ensuring that there’s enough trust in the community for people to take a vaccine.
jonathan.wosen @sduniontribune.com