In one Oregon town, volunteers are going into neighborhoods and offering people a free self-test for the coronavirus, in hopes of getting a more accurate snapshot of infections. Participants are able to get their results online and in the mail.
, says it has a straightforward goal:"To understand the prevalence of the virus in a community. In this case, Corvallis, Oregon."The project officially kicked off on the weekend of April 25-26, and is expected to last four weekends. Maintaining social distancing, two-person teams from the university community go door-to-door in different neighborhoods, asking residents to participate.
Because of a shortage of tests, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had originally recommended that priority for testing go to people who are sick and might be infected with the virus. Now, that list has expanded somewhat to include people such as healthcare workers or nursing home residents, who are at high risk of infection.
So far, the team has only been able to look at the data from the first 455 people tested, but that allowed a preliminary assessment of prevalence."The prevalence of infections is often very low, even when there are a very large number of cases," says
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