SHIELD Illinois news

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. 

A new paper in the journal Nature Communications details the innovations in modeling, saliva testing and results reporting of the SHIELD program that helped mitigate the spread of the virus at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the surrounding community.

SHIELD has been deployed in schools and communities across the state through the U of I System's SHIELD Illinois unit, and around the world through the university-related organization Shield T3.

SHIELD Illinois opened two additional free community testing sites in Chicago this month, bringing its total number of locations statewide to 44. The sites are located at Northeastern Illinois University’s locations in the Bronzeville and El Centro neighborhoods. 

An article in Scientific American discusses how saliva PCR tests developed by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and others may detect infections earlier in the course of an infection.

Illinois State University's COVID-19 testing lab is part of the University of Illinois System's SHIELD Illinois network and conducts tests on saliva samples from its community along with local community colleges, school districts and employers in the Bloomington-Normal area.

WTTW visited the SHIELD Illinois testing site at the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora and one of the SHIELD Illinois labs in North Chicago recently to take a look inside the massive operation.

Chicago Magazine—University of Illinois mobile labs scattered across the country can process up to 10,000 COVID-19 tests a day, with a turnaround of often under 12 hours. The testing medium? Not nasal swabs, but vials of spittle.

The program SHIELD Illinois, which originated at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in fall of 2020 to provide efficient saliva-based testing to students and faculty, has now expanded all across Illinois. 

SHIELD Illinois, the University of Illinois System’s in-state, non-profit COVID-testing unit, is partnering with DePaul University and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) to launch a free community testing site at DePaul’s Loop Campus.

A new CDC report published today confirms that the Test to Stay program, created locally by IDPH and operated by SHIELD Illinois, can help keep kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) students in the classroom.