Between September 28 and October 22, a total of 10,464 students and teachers at 243 randomly selected elementary and secondary schools throughout Austria were tested by means of a “gargle/spit test”.

The School SARS-CoV-2 monitoring study aims to determine the frequency of active SARS-CoV-2 infections of students and their teachers throughout Austria at elementary schools and at secondary school level 1 (middle school/lower-level AHS grades) over a 10-month period. The study was conducted by a consortium at the Medical University of Graz, the Medical University of Innsbruck, the Faculty of Medicine at the JKU Linz, and the University of Vienna in cooperation with the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Prof. Michael Wagner (University of Vienna) served as the scientific and academic coordinator.

 The study will continue and over the course of the academic year, the hope is to potentially detect changes in prevalence over time as well as more precisely determine differences between subgroups.  The study will play a key role in providing the public, government officials, and policy-makers with more detailed, up-to-date information by experts and from an epidemiological perspective.