Companies from Amazon.com Inc. to General Motors Co. are exploring ways to test their employees for Covid-19 before they come in to work.
Regular tests for workers could keep exposure to sick employees to a minimum and boost employees’ confidence about coming back to work, corporate medical advisers and human-resources executives say. Yet companies face hurdles in rapidly building testing capacity. For one, tests remain tough to obtain in large quantities, those people say, and the practice raises potential issues of privacy and liability.
Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, told shareholders Thursday that the company has started gathering the equipment it needs to build a Covid-19 testing lab for its employees. The e-commerce giant has redeployed a team of scientists, procurement specialists and software engineers to work on a lab for testing front-line workers.
“Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running,” Mr. Bezos wrote in the shareholder letter.
Business leaders convened by the Trump administration last week to discuss reopening the economy said the U.S. needed to dramatically increase the availability of testing before their workers would feel comfortable returning to the office. Some executives on the call indicated they were looking into providing tests for workers and, potentially, customers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Despite broad employer interest in testing, some executives discussing these plans say that there first must be enough tests for health workers and people who are sick. Many labs have faced challenges including a shortage of swabs and reagents, backlogs and unreliable results.
“I think the big question we’re seeing that everyone wants to know is how much testing we need to do at the individual employee level,” said Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics, a unit of German enterprise software giant SAP SE. Mr. Smith said he is considering various tests for his workforce.
While temperature screening and masks remain the most common types of protection companies are considering to protect their workforces, a survey earlier this month of Fortune 200 companies by Employer Health Innovation Roundtable, a benefits-focused industry group, found that about a quarter of the 40 survey respondents said they were considering some form of testing at worksites they plan to reopen in the next month.
Corporate testing sites could pop up in office buildings, or at nearby facilities that provide occupational health or primary care for workers, said Dr. Neal Mills, chief medical officer at Aon PLC, which advises companies on workplace benefits and sells retirement and insurance products. With the arrival of virus tests that deliver results in minutes, rather than days, employees could report to those sites for virus tests before heading into work, he said.
About 6,000 U.S. workers at memory-chip maker Micron Technology Inc. are working remotely. Testing has figured into Micron’s conversations about bringing workers back to the office, but would depend on availability, said Marni McDowell, the company’s director of global health and wellness. The tests could be performed in Micron’s on-site health centers, she said.
“To remove immediate risk from the population, diagnostic [testing] would be the best,” she said in an email. The cost and frequency of testing are among the issues under discussion among leaders of the Boise, Idaho-based company, she added, noting that Micron doesn’t expect a full return to the office until the fall.
Many employers routinely provide annual flu shots, but testing for coronavirus is more invasive and potentially hazardous, medical experts say. The tests typically take a swab from the back of a person’s nose or throat, and getting accurate results requires a trained tester clad in full protective gear, said Dr. Jeff Levin-Scherz, leader of Willis Towers Watson’s health-management practice.
That nose or throat swab test often elicits a cough from the patient, which could spread viral particles. “That’s not really good to do in the lobby of a factory or office,” he said.
Both government and business leaders say antibody tests, which detect the presence of immune-system markers that show a person has already had the virus, could allow for more certainty about which workers can safely re-enter public life. Doctors and researchers are still studying whether patients who have had the virus are immune from getting it again and, if so, for how long.
“The core tool we have to work with right now is direct covid testing,” said Othman Laraki, CEO of genetic-testing company Color, which also provides digital health tools and has started testing for coronavirus.
Color is currently managing a testing site for San Francisco first responders as well as other essential city employees. That site has the capacity to collect about 1,000 tests daily, and typically sends results to patients, their employers and public-health officials the day after a test, he said.
The frequency of testing by companies should depend on a worker’s potential exposure to the disease, Mr. Laraki said. The company hasn’t yet started testing its own 150 employees, but plans to within the next month.
GM has considered testing options for employees, including tests to detect antibodies, but privacy and logistical hurdles could be a sticking point, said Jim Glynn, the auto maker’s global chief of workplace safety.
Qualtrics’s Mr. Smith said he’s also thinking about testing employees for antibodies, although the company hasn’t developed formal plans to do so.
“I don’t think there’d be any downside,” Mr. Smith said, adding that testing could take place in the company parking lot. “We could easily test everyone, and it wouldn’t be that hard.”
Acting on virus-test results and storing that health data could pose quandaries for companies, according to human-resources executives and consultants. Employers have long been barred from asking employees personal questions about their health or home lives; in a pandemic, those same questions could help determine a person’s health risk or exposure to illness.
Some well-intended measures to protect workers could be perceived as discriminatory, corporate wellness experts warn. For example, if a company with reopened offices asks older or higher-risk employees to continue working remotely and they miss out on professional opportunities, can they claim bosses discriminated against them?
In a piece posted Sunday in The Wall Street Journal, former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Ostroff, a former deputy FDA commissioner, said, “Employers should make sure a positive diagnosis doesn’t become punitive: Maintain pay when someone agrees to self-isolate or stays home while awaiting a test result.”
In lieu of testing for now, businesses are trying other ways to gauge the health of their workers. Partners HealthCare in Boston, for example, requires employees to sign an attestation saying they feel well within two hours of the start of their shifts.
The return to work is “not going to be that soon and it’s going to have to be staged and managed,” said EHIR CEO Michael Laquere, whose group surveyed the Fortune 200 employers. “That’s the only consensus.”