Tag Archives: Pooled testing

December 2020—In Colorado, Joan Coleman, MBA, MT(ASCP), and her UCHealth colleagues launched an expansive pooled testing program this summer that, after much work, worked well—until it didn’t, thanks to rising positivity rates in October.

November 2020—Adam Barker, PhD, D(ABMM), was ready to call it quits. For weeks, he had been working to bring saliva-based SARS-CoV-2 testing to ARUP Laboratories and the University of Utah. Dr. Barker, director of ARUP’s COVID-19 rapid response lab, and his colleagues had done studies comparing saliva with nasopharyngeal swabs, which seemed to be following the flight of the passenger pigeon out of existence. They had wrestled with the FDA over emergency use authorization. They’d developed their own transport media, since that supply was also becoming extinct. He had begun building kits for saliva collection and figured out what sample size worked best. Kits had been delivered to collection sites on campus, and staff were being trained in their use. He was, in other words, creating a laboratory success story, one of the many that have been written since March. He was not basking in this fact. “I have to tell you: I lost so much sleep because of saliva,” says Dr. Barker, who is also director, ARUP Institute for Clinical and Experimental Pathology.