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tests per day, enough to have all students, staff, and faculty tested at least once a week.
“We hope this becomes a regional resource that serves the community with rapid testing,” he said, noting that a regional testing bureau charges between $120 and $160 per test, or between $2 million and
$3 million per week at the volume UMass can now conduct in-house.
“Imagine what that does to your campus finances,” he went on. “We can do it at 10 cents on the dollar
if we do it ourselves. Obviously, you need a major investment in staff, space, and equipment, but once we’ve made that investment, we can do much less expensive tests, they’re completely under our control, the turnaround time is super fast, and we can quickly put people into quarantine and do contact tracing.”
As time goes on, Reinhart said, IALS — and all the
“It was good to see we had so many people prepared to put in their time to help, and great to see that people who had run out of the ability to test were back doing testing”. We ended up doing a good thing.
departments at UMass with which it collaborates
— will continue to look for places it can make
a difference. One ongoing effort involves the development of a clinical testing lab that can identify individuals with antibodies that can neutralize the COVID-19 virus. “Students can donate a sample, and we’ll tell them whether we’re making antibodies or not.”
These efforts to address the COVID-19 crisis — and other projects yet to be determined — will continue, he added, because the pandemic is “far, far, far from over.”
While Western Mass. has been fortunate with its infection numbers, the virus is still spreading at the same rate it was in March, he went on, and a combination of the upcoming flu season and “PPE
fatigue,” among other factors, may yield a second spike of some kind. “I think we’re in for a period of increasing difficulties.”
That said, it’s been an immensely gratifying seven months at IALS.
“Everything was gloom and doom, everyone was at home, and it seemed that every news item you picked up was another downer on how dire things were,”
he recalled of the situation back in March. “Creating
a few feel-good stories and giving our students and faculty a chance to contribute to something positive was very helpful to them. I know it was for me.”
But it’s not how these dozens of unsung individuals
feel personally that makes them Healthcare Heroes. It’s the difference they’ve made in the fight against a virus that has proven a persistent, resilient foe.
“We weren’t good at logistics; we were engineers,” Reinhart said of efforts like distributing those
tens of thousands of face shields. But that effort demonstrates collaboration, too. “It was exciting. People were excited about throwing their weight behind a project that had immediate impact.”
Impact that will only continue as a truly challenging 2020 turns an uncertain corner into 2021. n
Peter Reinhart with some of the equipment that can process thousands of COVID-19 tests every day on the UMass campus.
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2020 HEALTHCARE HEROES