UMMS Affiliation

Department of Emergency Medicine

Publication Date

2021-06-30

Document Type

Article

Disciplines

Community Health and Preventive Medicine | Health Services Administration | Infectious Disease | Virus Diseases

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused more than 30 million infections in the United States between March 2020 and April 2021. In response to systemic disparities in SARS-CoV2 testing and COVID-19 infections, health systems, city leaders and community stakeholders in Worcester, Massachusetts created a citywide Equity Task Force with a specific goal of making low-barrier testing available to individuals throughout our community. Within months, the state of Massachusetts announced the Stop the Spread campaign, a state-funded testing venture. With this funding, and through our community-based approach, our team tested more than 48,363 individuals between August 3, 2020 and February 28, 2021. Through multiple PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycles, we optimized our process to test close to 300 individuals per hour. Our positivity rate ranged from 1.5% with our initial testing events to a high of 13.4% on January 6, 2021. During the challenges of providing traditional inpatient and ambulatory care during the pandemic, our health system, city leadership, and community advocacy groups united to broaden the scope of care to include widespread, population-based SARS-CoV2 testing. We anticipate that the lessons learned in conducting this testing campaign can be applied to further surges of SARS-CoV2, international environments, and future respiratory disease pandemics.

Keywords

COVID-19, SARS-CoV2, pandemic, public health, testing, Worcester, Massachusetts

Rights and Permissions

Copyright © 2021 Broach, Lowell, Brown, Martin, Muller, Shirshac, Perrone, Smith, Castiel, Kobayashi, Lapriore, Dickson and Babu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

DOI of Published Version

10.3389/fpubh.2021.695442

Source

Broach JP, Lowell M, Brown O, Martin C, Muller M, Shirshac J, Perrone D, Smith W, Castiel M, Kobayashi KJ, Lapriore CM, Dickson EW, Babu KM. A Citywide Approach to SARS-CoV2 Testing. Front Public Health. 2021 Jun 30;9:695442. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.695442. PMID: 34277553; PMCID: PMC8277977. Link to article on publisher's site

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Frontiers in public health

Related Resources

Link to Article in PubMed

PubMed ID

34277553

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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