COVID 19 Surveillance Testing: A Way Out? | Daniel Larremore
Channel: Policy-Relevant Science & Technology
Date: 2021-12-14

SUMMARY
Even though many SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infections produce no symptoms or mild symptoms, they are still capable of passing the virus to their contacts. Surveillance testing is an umbrella term describing the ways in which we might use widespread testing—of people with and without symptoms—to catch silent cases and suppress the ongoing epidemic. In this webinar, Dr. Larremore will discuss research on the effectiveness of broad, frequent, rapid testing in settings like workplaces, campuses, and even cities.

SPEAKER
Daniel Larremore is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also an affiliate of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is a member of the external faculty of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research develops mathematical methods using novel combinations of networks, dynamical systems, and statistical inference to solve problems in two main areas: infectious disease epidemiology and computational social science. This work focuses on generative models for networks, the ongoing evolution and genomic epidemiology of the malaria parasite, and the origins of social inequalities in academic hiring and careers. Prior to joining the University of Colorado faculty, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute 2015-2017 and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2012-2015. He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012, and holds an undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.

REFERENCES
[1] Rethinking Covid-19 Test Sensitivity — A Strategy for Containment https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025631
[2] Test sensitivity is secondary to frequency and turnaround time for COVID-19 screening https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd5393

#COVID19 #Testing