SPRINGFIELD —The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) today announced a renewed agreement with SHIELD Illinois that offers every public school outside of Chicago the opportunity to use the University of Illinois System’s innovative, saliva-based COVID-19 testing platform at no cost for the 2022-23 school year.
SHIELD Illinois provides on-demand saliva-based PCR tests through weekly screening testing at Illinois schools, businesses and government agencies. The U of I System’s non-profit, in-state COVID-testing unit, SHIELD Illinois has administered 6.4 million tests as of this month. Schools interested in renewing with SHIELD or beginning a partnership should sign up by July 15 in order to guarantee testing on the first day of school.
“Schools remain an important place for testing and preventing the spread of infection,” said Interim IDPH Director Amaal Tokars, Ph.D. “We want to do everything possible to prevent sickness among our children, which is why this renewal and continued testing is critical.” SHIELD Illinois provided testing for about 1 million students and staff in K-12 schools during the 2021- 22 school year; 57 community colleges and universities; numerous businesses, such as Rivian and ADM; and government agencies, including the Illinois General Assembly and the U.S. District Court of the Northern District. It also opened 48 free community testing sites.
So far in 2022, SHIELD Illinois has supplied results for its gold-standard PCR tests on average 16 hours from the time of collection. According to a study published June 9 in Nature Communications, mortality in the surrounding Champaign County was reduced more than four-fold relative to what would have been predicted in Fall 2020 thanks to aggressive testing on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.