A month ago, I sat down with the team behind the ongoing Covid-19 screening study taking place at NYU Abu Dhabi. Hopefully, insights from this conversation with the six staff and faculty members working to develop new testing procedures can clarify common questions and alleviate fears about the current situation on campus and across the world.

The responsibilities of the experimental team can be divided into two categories. The first is concerned with the implications of the pandemic with regard to public health. Dr. Ayaz Virji, Medical Director of the university’s Health Center, is leading a public health risk reduction group, while Raghib Ali, Director and Principal Investigator at NYUAD’s Public Health Research Center, is in charge of risk assessment on campus.

According to Ali, the primary way that Covid-19 spreads is through air and water droplets, which is why wearing masks has been made mandatory in many countries. This also explains why outdoor gatherings are much safer than indoor ones; a more confined space, often with limited ventilation, increases the likelihood of individuals coming into contact with viral particles.

Another slightly less common way that Covid-19 spreads is through contact with contaminated inanimate objects, which is why disinfecting work surfaces is vital. “[Covid-19] can exist for about three days on inanimate objects...like steel door handles and plastic light switches,” Virji explained. He added that the virus can also live for nine hours on human skin, while other flu viruses only last for two.

Virji clarified that coronaviruses have existed for thousands of years, but the various subtypes have been mostly harmless to humans. “[This virus] just has this really tiny mutation...that has allowed it to grab on to certain receptors in our body...and...harness a lot of damage,” he elaborated. “The novelty of this tiny, tiny mutated strain has really upended the world.”

The extent of this strain’s damage is largely due to the cytokine storm it initiates. Cytokines are molecules that activate the immune system. Sometimes, when released too quickly in large quantities, they can cause widespread inflammation and make the immune system’s reaction to the virus more lethal than the virus itself.

Furthermore, Covid-19 has widespread and unexpected consequences for patients. “[The virus] causes...a hypercoagulable state, which is an increase in risk of [blood] clotting,” Virji described. “In the younger people, so people in their 40s and 50s getting it, they’re at a higher risk of stroke, and that’s not supposed to happen with a cold virus.”

Other effects discussed include an increased risk of myocarditis, which can cause scarring in the heart and arrhythmia, as well as persistent fatigue, cognitive impairment and ongoing respiratory problems.

It is still difficult to predict who is more susceptible to these damaging symptoms and how long they will last.

The second key branch in the research team is the practical side of conducting screenings: collecting samples, decontaminating and analyzing them, and testing the method they developed. The goal is straightforward: to develop a more accurate, less time consuming and less invasive rapid testing method.

Kristin Gunsalus, a Professor of Biology, co-director of NYUAD’s Center for Genomics and Systems Biology and the co-principal investigator of the study, explained that there was a gold standard method to compare their work to. This method of rapid testing makes use of a process for replicating DNA called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR). By heating and cooling samples multiple times at specific temperatures, certain parts of the DNA can be copied and compared to the SARS CoV-2 genome to see if they match, thereby determining if the sample is positive for Covid-19.

This method, however, does have its drawbacks. “[PCR testing] takes several hours to execute and because a lot of the diagnostic laboratories have been backed up, it can take days or sometimes longer to get back a result,” Gunsalus explained, also citing concern that these tests do not have high sensitivity.

Sensitivity defines how precise a test is at detecting low amounts of Covid-19 in a sample, with less sensitive tests more likely to produce false negative results. “The false negative rate can be 20 to 30 percent, and that’s not very ideal if you’re trying to stop a pandemic,” Gunsalus added.

According to the research team, there are many ways in which the screening method they have developed is superior to the global gold standard. Youssef Idaghdour, Assistant Professor of Biology and co-principal investigator of the study, explained that practically speaking, nasal swabs are more cumbersome to collect than saliva samples. “There is a push by the Department of Health here [in the UAE] for using saliva, because in schools and children it’s much easier to use saliva samples,” he elaborated.

Gladys Tarisayi, a dean’s fellow for the Dean of Students’ Office, is working with the Health and Wellness Center to collect and deliver samples from students for testing. “In my interactions with students, they’re actually really happy that they don’t have to give a nasal swab, that it’s a saliva sample and it’s easy,” said Tarisayi.

More importantly, the method developed by Idaghour and Gunsalus has been shown to be much more accurate. “We started a collaboration with an accredited lab in Abu Dhabi to validate our methods, so they gave us access to about 200 samples that they’ve diagnosed,” Idaghour described. “We showed that about 20 percent, one in five, samples that are called negatives are actually positives. That was somewhat expected because we knew that our method was at least 100 times more sensitive than the method used in labs in Abu Dhabi and worldwide.”

According to Gunsalus, their testing method also gives specific information about how large the viral load in someone’s system is. “[The test] also provides a quantitative readout, which is important because people with different viral loads may have a different trajectory of disease and a different profile for infectivity,” she elaborated.

In terms of keeping yourself and others safe, Ali summed it up succinctly: “Air and water are certainly the biggest [methods of transmission] by far, and fomites and surfaces are thought to be… less important. Of course we continue washing hands and cleaning, but the key thing is social distancing and masks and not spending too much time indoors with other people.”

It is also vital for those on campus to make sure that they complete their biweekly tests, since it has been shown to be one of the most effective ways of protecting campus communities. “If you have enough people being screened and frequently enough, then you can bring down the transmission of the virus,” Ali claimed.

While participation in the screening study is voluntary, Idaghour explained that the more participants there are, the more data the team has and the more their method will get the attention and credit it deserves and possibly push for some changes in Department of Health’s Covid-19 policy.

Fabio Piano, Professor of Biology and former Provost, has been coordinating the implementation of the study on campus, and emphasized how important participation is for community cohesion and improvement as well: “The point of these kinds of studies is really to give a chance for people to impact the world by just participating in a research study…It would be really great if we could all see that we’re all in this together, this is part of a community project…this is one of the many ways that NYUAD is participating in the global fight against Covid-19.”