
A team involving two CHIBE members—CHIBE Associate Director Harsha Thirumurthy, PhD, and Message Effects Lab Director Jessica Fishman, PhD—has been awarded NIH funding to test strategies to increase COVID-19 testing rates. The other team members are Cedric Bien-Gund, MD; and Robert Gross, MD, MSCE, both from the Perelman School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases. To their knowledge, this group is the first to implement or test whether secondary distribution of COVID-19 self-tests by individuals to others in their social networks can promote SARS-CoV-2 testing. Their recent JAMA Network Open paper found high motivation to distribute COVID-19 self-test kits and to use self-test kits. In addition, this team will…