The latest round of surveillance testing of all students — conducted last Friday in Steele Hall — yielded one positive case at the State University of New York at Fredonia. The results were returned Sunday from SUNY Upstate Medical Center from the 337 samples collected.

In three rounds of surveillance testing so far on campus, Fredonia has tested 473 students and discovered two positive cases.

“Campus needed to ramp up its surveillance capacity in support of new pool testing guidelines for SUNY institutions,” said Vice President for Enrollment and Student Services Cedric Howard. “I would like to thank Debbie Dibble and the staff from the Student Health Center as well as staff from the Office of Residence Life for executing that plan.”

Fredonia will continue weekly testing of students with another large pool of students chosen at random. Students will be notified of their required participation.

Surveillance testing — also called pool testing — allows for about 12 people to be screened in one test. The testing can be done using saliva rather than by swabs that are inserted in a patient’s nose. Individuals administer the tests themselves, swabbing their mouths for 10 or 15 seconds, and provide the saliva samples to medical personnel.

The samples are combined into one, which is then tested at SUNY Upstate Medical Center. A negative test means that all people in the group are presumed, at the time the test was administered, to be coronavirus-free. A positive test for the pool would mean a secondary test is run on the individual samples in the pool to identify the positive sample(s). The pooled saliva testing simplifies sample collection processes, making it feasible to collect samples at a large scale and during a short period of time.

According to the university’s dashboard, there are currently eight active cases on campus as of Monday. There have been 99 cases since the start of the academic semester in August.