By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Oregon State University is expanding its groundbreaking COVID-19 sampling and research project into Newport this weekend to see how far the coronavirus has spread into the community.
The effort comes on the heals of Oregon’s largest workplace outbreak of COVID-19 at Pacific Seafood’s processing plants that is now spreading rapidly through the Newport area.
Lincoln County, which weeks ago had less than 10 cases, now has 206, the highest COVID-19 incident rate in Oregon. Two Newport restaurants have shut down after employees tested positive and health authorities are monitoring at least five other businesses for outbreaks.
Four people, including one seafood worker, have been hospitalized in the past week.
OSU has been conducting the door-to-door sampling – called TRACE-COVID-19 – in Corvallis and Bend to determine the prevalence of the virus in those communities. TRACE-COVID-19 stands for Team-based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics.
Now the university and its partners bring that effort to Newport.
OSU will take Census tract information for Newport and devise a sampling plan to cover the entire city. It will seek 400-450 samples from residents who volunteer to be tested.
TRACE field workers will visit selected homes Saturday and Sunday to ask household members to participate in the study. People who choose to take part are asked to provide information such as their name and date of birth; to fill out a simple consent form; and to answer a few confidential, health-related questions.
Participants are given a nasal-swab test kit that they administer to themselves inside their home and their minor children if they want them to take part. The field staff wait outside, and the participants leave the completed test kits outside their front door. Field staff do not enter anyone’s home.
“The importance in this case is to see how far the coronavirus has spread into the community” from the workplace outbreaks, said Steve Clark, an OSU spokesman.
In Newport, the weekend project will include the collaboration of OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, the OSU Extension Service and the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences, which will assist Lincoln County health officials with contact tracing for any positive tests that might result from the TRACE sampling.
“Being true to the rapid designation and purpose of TRACE, we are pleased to be able to nimbly and rapidly respond to help inform the Lincoln County response to this acute COVID-19 outbreak,” Javier Nieto, dean of OSU’s College of Public Health and Human Sciences and one of the TRACE-COVID-19 project’s principal research investigators, said in a news release announcing the project in Newport.
The idea of TRACE is to rapidly assess coronavirus prevalence in a community, said Ben Dalziel, assistant professor in the College of Science at OSU and co-director of the project.
“It’s important to collaborate with Lincoln County health officials and the Newport community to better understand what’s happening in real time with the virus on a local level,” Dalziel said.
Newport’s population is 10,600, comprising roughly 20 percent of the nearly 50,000 people who live in Lincoln County.
TRACE-COVID-19 began in Corvallis the weekend of April 25-26 as a partnership between five OSU colleges and the Benton County Health Department and continued the subsequent two weekends. The fourth weekend of sampling had originally been scheduled for May 16-17 but was rescheduled to June 13-14 to help determine if relaxing stay-at-home orders led to a jump in the prevalence of the virus in the Corvallis community.
The field workers leave participants with information about the project and how they will receive their results – available in seven to 10 days – as well as health guidance from Lincoln County and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants in the study are sent their results and those of their minor children by secure e-mail with receipt by standard mail delivery as a backup. Everyone’s personal information is safeguarded.
In announcing prevalence results, the TRACE team follows reporting policies used by the Oregon Health Authority and local health departments by not announcing numbers of positive cases between 1 and 9. Doing so may contribute to identifying an actual community member who tested positive, Dalziel said.
The study was initially funded by OSU and a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and has been aided by work from the OSU Foundation and the OSU Alumni Association. Funding from PacificSource Health plans has allowed for the expansion to Bend and Newport, and additional sampling in Corvallis.
The diagnostic testing component of TRACE operates through a partnership between the Oregon Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, which is located at OSU, and Willamette Valley Toxicology.
For more information TRACE, visit the TRACE-COVID-19 website. The site includes a list of frequently asked questions.