Essential Workers and Businesses Need Support
The Carbon Health team has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis since January and in that time we’ve screened tens of thousands of patients for the virus. We’ve worked with dozens of labs, test manufacturers, and health organizations to test at-risk populations, and essential workers so they can get back to work. Along the way, we’ve built a testing center database, offered testing in our clinics, and even added a mobile clinic that went in to test underserved communities across Northern California.
We’ve also openly shared our high-quality clinical data with the hope we can:
- accelerate information sharing among frontline healthcare providers and
- facilitate studies on COVID-19 signs, symptoms, stages, and care plans.
As a team, we’ve thought long and hard about what it would take to get people back to work safely. Today, more than ever, we believe widespread, affordable, and accessible testing is necessary to return to any semblance of the life we used to know. With widespread testing and contact tracing, we have a shot at minimizing the spread of COVID-19, tracking transmission chains, and thoughtfully reopening communities and businesses in a safe and controlled way.
We’ve taken inspiration from a few expertly authored policy plans and thought pieces to create a proposal to reopen businesses while keeping communities safe.
As healthcare providers we have a front-row seat to the pandemic. Our team is working hard to find safe solutions to get the economy back up and running in a timely fashion. We encourage you to review, refine, ask questions, and provide feedback to our approach.
Systems Approach
The way COVID-19 infections manifest differs from person-to-person, with some vulnerable groups at a greater risk of death if infected. We’re still only learning about the long-term effects of the virus as well. Keeping these unknown variables in mind, we’re thinking through what systems need to be put in place for society to operate safely, and for individuals to feel confident in their own safety.
We’re starting with baseline testing
We’ve started helping essential businesses get back to work with our COVID Ready program, which includes baseline testing. Baseline testing is the process of testing 100% of your employee population for a live virus infection using a variety of possible testing modalities. Coupled with a robust employee monitoring, education, and contact tracing program, businesses can use the tools we’ve developed to restart their businesses, prevent outbreaks, and keep their lights on.
We’ve already executed baseline testing programs for several essential businesses across manufacturing, retail, and elder care in California, and we’re partnering with hundreds more.
Today, our baseline testing is entirely PCR-based, with plans to incorporate serology testing as it rolls out to the public. This test can help businesses better understand which employees are currently infected and should not come into work, who has previously been infected, and (as our understanding of the pandemic grows) who has any kind of immunity.
What’s next
Over the coming days, we’ll continue helping essential businesses design their work protocols, provide clinical guidance to infected employees, and reduce the likelihood of workplace outbreaks. Our mobile testing center is already bringing tests to underserved communities around the Bay Area.
Carbon Health has been working with the City of San Francisco to manage testing programs for more than 2,000 nursing home residents across 20 sites with plans to bring more testing to assisted living facilities, manufacturing plants, and other high-risk essential businesses soon.
What’s missing
Working with several labs and test manufacturers, it’s clear there is still a need for rapid (under 1 minute), low cost (less than $1), high sensitivity, portable PCR tests, with results you can read at home. As a comparison, the standard flu test, which has been around for decades and tested on millions of people still must be done in a facility and retails for around $60.
An improvement in diagnostics technology that shortens the test time to less than 1 minute or provides an order of magnitude improvement in lowering the cost, would be a material lever in reopening society. If this kind of test existed, it could be deployed rapidly and with higher frequency, offered in more places, and help the country reopen safely.
How you can help
If you’re an essential business and you need help with testing, get in touch at essentialbusiness@carbonhealth.com.
If you are involved in the testing domain, we’d like to talk to you. We’re constantly looking for ways to expand testing capacity, and are particularly interested in high-speed or high capacity testing modalities.If we partnered together, we can help you run your trial, share our existing learnings, and deploy into the right communities and businesses that need testing. If this applies to you, get in touch at essentialbusiness@carbonhealth.com.
Conclusion
Expanding testing capacity to essential businesses will help protect our most vulnerable populations, enable society to slowly open up, and get the economy running again. This effort will require massive collaboration and coordination between public and private sectors of the state, and we are eager to work with different thought leaders and innovative companies so we can continue to learn and iterate on our processes with the latest evidence-based information.
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