Will I have to quarantine if someone in my pool tests positive?
Possibly, but for 24 hours or less.
Pool testing combines samples from 10 people at random. If the pool tests positive, that means one or more individuals in the pool are infected with COVID-19. All 10 individual samples within a positive pool are immediately retested to determine which individual(s) are positive.
There have been cases when this secondary test is not conducted until the next day, due to high testing volume at SUNY Upstate Medical University, which means that everyone in the pool must quarantine until individual results are known.
To minimize the impact of having to quarantine an entire pool, we asked Upstate to reduce our pool size from 12 to 10, which has been approved. Pools are also now sorted into employee or student samples only.
Should residential students need to quarantine while we wait for individual results, they will do so in their own room rather than being moved into Awosting Hall. No contact tracing will be done until individual results are confirmed.
Only individuals who have tested positive will need to isolate for 10 days to protect others from contracting COVID-19.
