When the Northeastern community returns to weekly surveillance COVID-19 testing in the fall for everyone, regardless of vaccination status, the COVID-19 wellness team won’t just be monitoring positive or negative cases. They’ll also be keeping track of the variants of the virus that are infecting the community—and they will be able to quickly identify which strains are responsible.

Jared Auclair is director of biotechnology and bioinformatics in the College of Science and runs the Life Science Testing Center at Northeastern’s Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northeastern University

“The pandemic is not over, but it has evolved,” says Jared Auclair, who runs Northeastern’s COVID-19 testing facility, the Life Sciences Testing Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. “There are a couple of important things to think about in our testing strategy: We still need to provide the binary positive or negative, which we’ll do, but we are supplementing that with additional tests to determine what is going on in those positive patients, what’s happening within our Northeastern population.”

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Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.