Testing: For the Good of the Community
By Jeremy Vickers, Associate Vice President, External Affairs
It may appear passe to say something is ‘better, cheaper, and faster’ as a means of communicating a value proposition, but Baylor’s partnership with My Labs Direct is just that. By building a full-scale testing facility within the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC), COVID-19 testing on the campus of Baylor University is occurring a rapid speed and scale. When the decision was made to invest in the long-term assets of a testing facility a much larger opportunity was taking shape. That opportunity was to increase the capacity of and direct access to high quality, affordable, and quick test results for the broader community.Each day, the My Labs Direct-Baylor testing site has the capacity to test roughly eight thousand individual COVID-19 tests, but at Baylor’s current use of 3,100 daily tests there remains an opportunity for others to leverage this asset. Over the past few weeks, one Baylor’s cherished partners, the Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce, stepped up to ensure as many businesses in the community were aware of this opportunity. By reaching out directly to over one hundred local businesses, the Chamber has connected this resource to organizations that may not have had the ability to test staff regularly or within a timeframe, in this case 24-hour results from My Labs Direct, that justified that investment.
You may be asking yourself, why is this important, how does it affect me, and aren’t we decreasing testing in the coming months because of vaccine distribution? In short, the increase of testing capacity has significant short- and long-term benefits in our community. Short term, a significantly higher number of citizens, students and non-students alike, will have regular testing with quick results will have an immediate impact on reducing community spread of coronavirus in the meantime of waiting for mass vaccine distribution. In a longer-term context, an increase in the number of tests in a given community, coupled with the natural decrease of positivity rate, will provide an opportunity for businesses to reopen, restaurants to increase capacity, and ultimately for our community to see the decline in community spread we so desperately desire. Finally, vaccine distribution is here and there is an excitement and anticipation that is growing daily, but timelines and quantities of vaccines appear to be fluid with the most likely scenario now looking as if the community hits a tipping point of majority citizen vaccination sometime in the summer, or possibly, early fall.
While the investment in testing is high, the community benefits are even higher and we take this opportunity to celebrate the vision of Baylor leaders to seek out this partnership as well as the Greater Waco Chamber for committing the time to ensure this valuable resource is accessible to our business community.