Big tech zeros in on virus-testing market

Firms jumping to assist employers against outbreaks

Verily Life Sciences scrambled to introduce a free coronavirus screening site for the public and set up testing locations in March after President Donald Trump made an off-the-cuff announcement about the program. After a rocky start, it has since helped more than 220,000 people get tested in 13 states.

Now the company has its sights on employers. It is introducing a health screening and analytics service for businesses trying to reopen during the pandemic.

The service, announced Thursday, will offer COVID-19 diagnostic testing for employees and clear them to return to the workplace based on test results and other data. It will also make recommendations to employers on how often workers should be retested based on the prevalence of the virus in their workforce and the local community.

“Employers are really focusing on how to ensure that they are not the source of another outbreak,” said Dr. Vivian Lee, president of health platforms at Verily, a unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

With its new service, Verily is joining numerous tech giants and startups rushing to help business across the country as they grapple with how to safely reopen the workplace. Microsoft and the large insurer UnitedHealth Group recently collaborated on a free symptom-checking app that helps pinpoint workers at obvious risk for the virus and directs them to testing resources.

Kogniz, an artificial intelligence startup, is marketing thermal camera systems as coronavirus fever-screening and

“social distancing enforcement” tools for the workplace. And Jvion, another AI startup, is marketing an “employer recovery package” to predict the risk of employee exposure to the virus and likelihood of developing it.

There is such a glut of new coronavirus risk-reduction products that many employers are scrambling to assess them all.

To address the fragmented market, Verily and other health companies are introducing more comprehensive health-screening programs for employers, complete with COVID-19 lab tests and health counseling for employees who test positive.

The new services are also trying to mitigate a pressing problem for employers: perhaps as many as one-quarter or more of people who have the virus do not experience symptoms. That means symptom-checking apps and fever-scanning cameras could clear employees who have the virus to return, where they might inadvertently infect their colleagues.

Color, a Bay Area health technology company whose labs are processing COVID-19 tests for the city of San Francisco, this week reported that, among a group of 30,000 it tested for the virus, the majority of those who tested positive had mild or no symptoms.

Many medical centers, nursing homes and other high-risk facilities for essential workers have adopted such employee-testing programs. Color’s program for businesses that are reopening involves testing employees for the virus at least once before they return to the workplace and then testing asymptomatic employees again at regular intervals.

“There was no infrastructure in place for businesses to test asymptomatic persons,” said Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, chief executive of Verve Therapeutics, a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that began using Color’s program in May in a pilot test with 11 other local biotech firms.