Oregon State University researchers have received a $2 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to create a national TRACE Center that will expand the OSU’s COVID-19 public health project to other states.
Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics, or TRACE-COVID-19, was launched by OSU in April with door-to-door sampling in Corvallis, home to Oregon State’s main campus, and expanded to other cities around the state, including Hermiston, while also adding a wastewater testing component.
The center will harness the power of public health departments, universities and other institutions around the country to help measure the prevalence of the virus that causes COVID-19 by combining community surveillance sampling, wastewater analysis, viral sequence data and mathematical models of SARS-CoV-2 prevalence that OSU TRACE researchers have developed.
“In most communities across the country, it is still very hard to get reliable estimates of how many people are actually infected,” said TRACE leader Ben Dalziel, a population biologist in the OSU College of Science. “The TRACE Center will support a network of university-community partnerships that monitor local prevalence and develop new approaches for community-based COVID monitoring. We are extremely grateful to the Packard Foundation for helping us expand this work to other institutions and communities.”
Chad English, science program officer for the Packard Foundation, said OSU’s TRACE work is different than most coronavirus testing strategies that rely on “trailing indicators” and provide more information about past infections than who is currently infected.
“The TRACE study and its approach to tracking the prevalence and spread of the coronavirus have proven invaluable to communities in Oregon,” said English. “With the data and other insights that TRACE provides, public health leaders now have a powerful tool in their hands to better assess the threat of the virus and make decisions in the best interest of their community.
Anyone interested in partnering on the TRACE project is encouraged to reach out to the TRACE Coordinating Center at center@trace.oregonstate.edu.
