Editor’s note: Kudos to UC San Diego! This is destined to be a pioneering program for college students. Our son Mitchell is going to Johns Hopkins University, but UC San Diego also was one of his top choices. He attended a summer program called COSMOS there, called “Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine.”
“UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said Tuesday the university is going to begin mass testing students for the novel coronavirus as a major step toward resuming on-campus courses in the fall.
“The school’s experimental ‘Return to Learn’ program will begin May 11 when UCSD starts giving self-administered tests to 5,000 students who are currently living in campus housing. The testing is voluntary; students must opt in.
“If the program works, UCSD officials plan to test roughly 65,000 students, faculty and staff on a monthly basis.
“UCSD will become the first campus in the University of California system and one of the first in the U.S. to broadly test students for the coronavirus — an undertaking it is well-suited to do. It operates UC San Diego Health, which includes two major hospitals and many clinics, all which are tied to one of the largest medical research programs in the U.S.”
“This effort will leverage the ingenuity and expertise of our clinicians, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, bioinformaticians, and others to work toward a tailored map of where the virus is, and where it isn’t,” Khosla said in a statement.
“We expect these efforts to help put us in the best possible position to minimize virus outbreaks and implement new interventions as needed, should we resume in-person activities this fall.”
The rest of the article is here.
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