LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- The University of Louisville will work with a new Metro Government task force to study how widespread COVID-19 is in the local area, city officials announced Wednesday.
The U of L School of Medicine will test thousands of people across four different parts of Louisville for the respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and its antibodies, said Bill Altman, a consultant to the Louisville Metro Department of Health and Wellness.
Plans call for 2,400 tests per month for seven months, with the screenings starting "soon," and the first results available by early August, said Altman, a former Kindred Health executive and Metro Board of Health chair.
Altman said testing those who have COVID-19, as well as those who have previously contracted it, will let officials "understand the level of spread that occurred, which gives us a lot of insight into how to prepare with the future."
U of L encourages people to register for the testing project at co-immunityproject.com.
The work is part of a broader COVID-19 study that began with health care workers. It is funded by the University of Louisville's Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute and the Louisville Healthcare CEO Council, along with Baptist Health, Norton Healthcare and U of L Health.
The research into the disease's prevalence in the Metro community appears similar to a statewide study underway in Indiana, where the Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis plans to test for the disease and its antibodies through next April.
The Fairbanks School's first wave of testing found that an estimated 2.8% of Hoosiers had COVID-19 around May 1 — or nearly 11 times more than the 17,000 confirmed cases at the time.
It also concluded that 45% of people who tested positive had no symptoms at all.
Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said Altman will be part of a newly created city task force that will focus on testing and contact tracing.
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