The University of Fribourg is integrated into the pilot project for large-scale testing on asymptomatic persons. On 23 and 24 March, nearly 1000 people can potentially participate in saliva pooling tests on the site of the Faculty of Science and Medicine on Pérolles Campus.

The administrative, logistic and cleaning personnel, the professors and all the scientific staff of the Faculty of Science and Medicine, almost 1000 persons, will be invited to get a saliva test done on 23 and 24 March. As a reminder, the tests for asymptomatic persons aims at breaking the infectious transmission chains by identifying rapidly any infected person. The objective of this pilot test is to prepare a progressive return of students to the University, most of which are currently forced to follow online courses.

It is important to highlight that the invited personnel will be tested on a voluntary basis, and that the system put in place does not allow the employer to see if someone gets a test or not.

These tests could be extended to other faculties and schools as well as to students in the coming weeks.

The pilot project for large-scale testing will be evaluated at the end of March. This will enable the details of a concept to be defined for April.

Saliva pooling tests
The pooling test consists of using one test for analysing several samples from different participants together. Should one of these grouped tests be positive, then at least one of the group members is infected. In this case, the group members are retested individually to determine the positive candidate. The pooling approach allows to significantly fasten the large-scale testing.