The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced a $2 million commitment to expand the Team-Based Rapid Assessment of Community-Level Coronavirus Epidemics (TRACE), a COVID-19 tracking model.

Led by a team at Oregon State University, and in partnership with public health authorities, the TRACE model uses a population testing and monitoring approach that enables community-level virus surveillance in real time. To that end, researchers at OSU distribute self-administered coronavirus testing kits to randomly selected households within a representative set of neighborhoods and combine the test sample results with data from other monitoring strategies — including wastewater/sewage testing, Internet-connected thermometers, and contact tracing — to assemble an integrated picture of the status and spread of the virus in a geographic area.

The grant from the Packard Foundation, which committed $1.15 million to the project in April, will be used to expand the effort to other states and research universities and create a coordination center that can provide the training, infrastructure, and skills-sharing needed to scale the model quickly. Additional funding for TRACE has been provided by OSU, the Oregon Health Authority, and PacificSource Community Solutions.

"There are approximately a hundred fifty research universities across the United States [that] have the capacity to help scale this," wrote Chad English, science program officer of the Conservation and Science program at the Packard Foundation, in a blog post. "Many of these research universities have untapped capacity to contribute to helping their states tackle the coronavirus. They represent hidden but powerful potential that could be enlisted in fighting the virus."