With a quicker turnaround time and less saliva required, COVID-19 testing is about to get a little bit easier for Ohio State students.

Ohio State started testing saliva samples for COVID-19 in a lab on campus rather than outsourcing testing to third-party provider Vault about 45 days ago, Seth Faith, technical supervisor of the lab, said. He said the lab is still ramping up but will conduct about 20,000 tests per week when at full capacity. 

Ohio State collaborated with other universities also internalizing their testing, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Missouri-St. Louis and Northeastern University.

“We’ve had a chance to talk to other universities that are doing this as well and learned some of the lessons that they’ve learned themselves in the summer leading up to the fall,” Faith said. 

The university is transitioning to internal testing for price and time efficiency, Dr. Leona Ayers, director of the lab, said. She said relying on outside vendors like Vault is costly and an Oct. 15 university press release stated cost per test will be 85 percent lower with on campus processing.

Tests conducted locally have an approximate 24-hour turnaround time compared to two to three days for tests through Vault, which are transported to a laboratory in New Jersey. A faster turnaround time allows contact tracers to identify infectious individuals so they can isolate or quarantine sooner, Ayers said.

“The objective is to, as quickly as possible, remove positive individuals from the community and quarantine,” Ayers said. “One person at a party can result in 15 or 20 new positives.”

Samples collected for the on-campus laboratory will require less saliva than the test administered by Vault, Jeff Jahnes, general supervisor of the lab, said. This change will reduce the amount of time it takes for students — some of whom take COVID-19 tests weekly — to complete a test.

The lab is still hiring and training staff and awaiting additional equipment but expects to be operating at around half capacity within the next two weeks, with hopes to fully internalize all university testing by spring semester, Jahnes said. 

“It has been a really tremendous response by the Ohio State community to get this all together,” Jahnes said. “We’ve worked with hundreds of people all over campus.”