Air Canada, Rogers and Suncor part of consortium piloting rapid COVID-19 testing

Canadian space technology and robotics giant MDA will begin offering its workers rapid COVID-19 testing at its Brampton, Ont., headquarters starting Tuesday, the latest company in a consortium of some of the country’s biggest firms testing workplace screening.

The pilot is being run by the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, partnered with 12 companies including some of Canada’s top airlines, banks and sports teams to experiment with antigen tests that take about 15 minutes to deliver results.

Those behind the project believe it could give Canada’s corporate world a road map to quelling the spread of COVID-19 in workplaces that have had to close or have struggled to contain outbreaks.

“It’s a tool to be able to reopen parts of the economy and not have these broad range closures,” Holly Johnson, MDA’s director of business operations, said in an interview.

“The advantage of this kind of screening — if you can roll it out at scale and get mass screening across a wide range of workplaces and facilities — is that you can imagine wide areas of the economy being able to be opened up again.”

The company’s Brampton facility — which normally has a complement of about 450 employees — currently has between 85 to 100 workers on-site daily. So far, about 60 of those workers have signed up for the testing, she said.

The rapid testing at MDA is a voluntary program and is offered on top of mandatory COVID-19 protocols that are already in place, such as symptom screening, temperature testing, physical distancing and masks, Johnson said.

Workers at the space technology company register for the rapid test pilot program and sign a consent form using an app developed by Microsoft Canada Inc.

The app is also used to schedule the COVID-19 appointment and to check in when they arrive.

The test itself is a nasal swab - not the “deep brain tickler” of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, Johnson said.

After the test, employees return to the workplace and are notified of the results within about 15 minutes through the app, she said.

If the worker tests positive, the employee is asked to leave the workplace to obtain a PCR test from a provincial testing site, a deep cleaning occurs and contact tracing takes place, Johnson said.

If the PCR test is positive, the worker is required to complete the necessary quarantine and can transition to working from home.

“The employee will still get paid,” Johnson said.

She added that she’s hopeful more workers will sign up in the coming days.

“What we are trying to do is break the chain of transmission,” said Ajay Agrawal, the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, a non-profit helping science and tech firms.