Employers are hard-pressed to provide workplace COVID-19 testing for their employees while ensuring a safe working environment, complying fully and minimizing risks. Most are cognizant of the fact that any asymptomatic employee can be a carrier and easily infect the entire workforce. This could easily translate to massive man-hour losses for the company. Most importantly, the health and safety of the staff and their families would be greatly compromised.

With this realization, employers must conduct accurate & frequent testing to ensure the safety of all their employees.

As we adapt to “living with the novel coronavirus,” communities, public health organizations, neighborhoods, corporates, and similar institutions need to take COVID-19 safety precautions and accelerate testing. Mobile or pop-up COVID-19 diagnostic laboratories facilitate field-based testing and bring COVID-19 testing to all areas, no matter where people live or work. Mobile testing laboratories can be quickly deployed in hot spots, underserved communities, and workplaces. Widespread and easily accessible testing is crucial to meet the testing demand and prevent the spread of COVID-19 in the community. Consequently, public and private organizations are looking for cost-effective yet reliable methods for onsite testing that save time and space.

After a long period of remote classes, learning institutions are gearing up for physical reopening. As much as this may sound exciting, it is scary at the same time. The reason being that COVID-19 is still with us at large. If anything, new infectious variants are emerging with time. How can schools and universities guarantee the safety of their students and staff as they resume in-person classes?

Those in congregate settings such as learning institutions are at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the early detection and isolation of infected individuals in such institutions will help to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, administrators at such institutions need to take extra measures to ensure the safety of their staff and students as they resume in-person classes. Widespread testing is crucial to identify infected students and isolate them to curb the spread of the virus. Other measures that learning institutions need to implement include hand washing, social distancing, using face masks, ensuring adequate ventilation, and vaccinating staff and students.

COVID-19 testing is an effective strategy to combat the global pandemic that has so far resulted in millions of deaths globally. While most testing is usually carried out in third-party labs, clinics and physician offices provide an opportunity for onsite testing that increases the efficiency of testing and reduces associated costs at the same time.

Physician office labs (POLs) improve patient care because they facilitate early diagnosis and consequently early initiation of treatment. When physicians have an in-house laboratory, they can test their patients immediately whenever they deem it necessary. This also means that they can access test results sooner and embark on a clinical course without any delay. Such a process minimizes sample loss or mix-ups that may occur during the transportation of samples from physician offices to an offsite testing laboratory.