COVID In Colorado: Middle School Students Join Experts In Mask Study
AURORA, Colo. (CBS4) - Researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health are investing resources their energy into Colorado schools. They hope a new COVID study will not only result in safer hallways, but a larger impact when it comes to detection of respiratory illnesses across the world.
"I kept thinking what we needed to do was to capture that breath and see how infectious people are," said Dr. May Chu, a Clinical Professor in Department of Epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health.
Chu is also a Senior Investigator at the Center for Global Health and is used to studying infectious diseases across the globe and when she realized SARS COVID-2 was transmitted through the air, saw an opportunity to detect it in asymptomatic people through mask wearing.
"The University of Lester in the UK was using test strips to identify types of drug resistant tuberculosis in patients in South Africa with better accuracy and specificity," she said.
Chu knew she could do the same without traveling very far. She and colleague Dr. Thomas Jaenisch, an associate professor in epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health, teamed up to create a mask strip study specific to detecting COVID and its variants.
In need of volunteers, researchers initially began with college students but soon found with COVID fatigue, the willingness to participate was low. For students at the Aurora Science & Tech Middle School, it was a great opportunity.
"So we kind of went from college students to middle schools," said Jaenisch. "It's always the same question, how can we find out who is transmitting and what are the risk factors around who is transmitting more than others, and this is kind of why we want to tease apart that kind of testing and wearing masks because they represent two different sides of the same coin, being infected yourself versus also being infectious to others."
The students wear the mask in the morning and turn it in along with a nasal swab for comparison at lunch.
"It's been really wonderful because this has allowed us to identify asymptomatic members of our community," said Principal Rebecca Bloch.
While the strip is a PCR test, eventually, the goal is to have a strip in the masks that changes color.
"If we could do these measurements we'll be able to come up with some metrics, you know, maybe standard metrics in which then we know what to do going forward, because I'm sure we're gonna have more and more SARS Coronavirus-2 variants," Chu said. "Whether they're more infectious or more spreadable we don't know, but I think we have bought ourselves perhaps a little lull time after this last big surge that we should be prepared for the next one."
While there are still mask mandates in schools, researchers plan to move the study into elementary schools and pair their mask strip study with one additional, important component.
"Which is a researcher from Boulder, Mark Hernandez who is an engineer and he's working on air quality and air filtration in schools and he has that going with DPS in the elementary schools and he was looking for a partner who could actually read out the human component so the infection status in humans and then correlate it with which rooms have the best air filtration, and air turn around and air quality," Jaenisch said. "That's the next step for us, we have invited him to join us in the middle school here at Aurora Science and Tech, and he has invited us to join his schools that he's already working with in DPS And we just got permission that we could continue with that."
Right now, both researchers say the most important thing is for people to get.
"Right now there's free testing for K-12 schools offered by CDPHE and also offered by COVID check Colorado who is a partner in our study," said Chu.
Chu says only about one percent of schools in Colorado are signed up for the free program.
"This free weekly testing and so it's gonna be really hard to know what the community level is if you don't test," she said.
