It’s galling that celebrities, professional athletes and politicians without symptoms were able to use their connections and wealth to score COVID-19 tests early in the pandemic, when physicians and hospitals didn’t have enough to go around for the sick patients who probably did have the disease.
For that reason, some people might feel irritated with one Northern California community that launched a large-scale, self-funded effort Monday to test all of its residents.
But don’t hate Bolinas. This is a case not of rich people bogarting a scarce supply of tests but of a historically civic-minded community (whose residents are not all wealthy, by the way) leveraging its resources to do us all a favor.
And we all should be thanking this little town’s residents profusely for conceiving, funding, launching, volunteering and offering up their bodies for the nation’s first community-wide COVID-19 viral and antibody testing study.
Although there have been a smattering of large-scale testing studies in the U.S., they all focused on either chemical analyses that detect active COVID-19 infections or antibody tests that determine if someone had previously contracted and overcome the virus. Not both. But experts say that the key to lifting stay-at-home orders is having reliable data from testing of both types done on a high percentage of the local population. This will help epidemiologists better understand infection and exposure rates as well as how the virus moves through a community.
The study was conceived by two Bolinas residents, a venture capitalist and a pharmaceutical executive. They reached out to other community members for support and to the University of California, San Francisco infectious disease researchers to see if they would help them do the testing program, which is free for all of Bolinas’ 1,600 residents and funded by donations.
UCSF researchers said yes, seeing the epidemiological value of such a broad study. Separately, UCSF has developed a companion testing study for San Francisco’s Mission District that’s slated to begin Saturday and will provide another community-wide snapshot of COVID-19 for comparison.
The communities differ in important ways. Surrounded by water and rugged coastline, Bolinas is rural and geographically isolated — yet it’s a tourist destination that continued to admit visitors during the lockdown. The Mission District is a dense urban neighborhood with no physical borders.
The samples gathered from both studies will be tested by UCSF labs and the results analyzed by UCSF researchers. Positive cases will get further support and contact tracing. As soon as next week, aggregate data about active infections will be shared publicly so that health officials in other places can use the information to better understand how infections spread.
Not only will this effort give us important data about COVID-19 upon which other communities can build to develop public health strategies, it’s a blueprint they can follow to do their own studies. And they should.
This editorial first appeared in the Los Angeles Times on Friday. This commentary should be considered another point of view and not necessarily the opinion or editorial policy of The Dominion Post.
