Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-level coronavirus Epidemics

TRACE-COVID-19 is a public health project that is gathering timely information that is essential for informing measures to slow the spread and minimize the impact of the disease. Because testing has been limited, and because only individuals with symptoms have been tested, no one knows how many people in Corvallis, Bend, Newport, or Hermiston — or most other places — actually have the virus. TRACE-COVID-19 is filling that gap in Corvallis, Bend, Newport, and Hermiston and we hope later in other Oregon communities and across the nation.

Participants in this project are helping enable a more effective response to COVID-19.

A number of households in a representative set of neighborhoods across Corvallis, Bend, Newport, and Hermiston are being invited to participate in the study by field staff going door-to-door. Participants receive a home test kit to use inside their home and then return it to the staff.

By agreeing to participate in the TRACE-COVID-19 study, participants are helping public health leaders and scientists understand how prevalent the virus that causes COVID-19 is in Corvallis, Bend, Newport, and Hermiston and how its prevalence is changing. With a clearer understanding of how the virus spreads, public health leaders, health care providers and individuals can make informed decisions about policies and the use of time and resources to slow the spread of the virus and minimize its impacts.

Additionally, sewer samples are being taken at the cities’ wastewater treatment plants as well as in the sewer lines of select neighborhoods. The concentration of remnants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus responsible for COVID-19) will be quantified in these samples. Given that everyone contributes to the composition of a city’s or community’s wastewater, this strategy will provide another layer of evidence to determine if COVID-19 is present in the community. Additionally, this methodology will provide a general sense of the level of infection for that city or community.

It is critical that we all act quickly.