How to tell if your business is at higher risk of a COVID-19 outbreak — 3 critical questions

The pandemic presents risks for every kind of company — but is your business more vulnerable than others? When an outbreak hits a single-site organisation, the ripple effects can be hard to recover from.

If your success and viability live or die by a single location — like many firms within the manufacturing, warehousing and logistics sectors — one COVID-19 carrier could trigger your worst-case scenario. The cost of staff isolation, productivity dips and closures can be crippling, particularly if you’re shutting down at a peak time for your competitors. With the dramatic rise of the Delta variant, you need to work harder to prevent transmission, build operational resilience and pinpoint risks before they become a problem.

Twice-weekly workforce testing is the answer, though probably not as you know it. Right now, you might be using government-issued lateral flow tests. These are better than no screening at all, but they’re not your best defence. Here’s why:

• The current tests can deliver false positives by picking up legacy indicators of infection like antibodies or viral shedding. Even if an employee has been exposed to COVID-19 in the past but poses zero danger to co-workers, they’ll still test positive and kickstart the costly process of self-isolation, contact tracing and PCR screening.
• Standard lateral flow tests are painful and uncomfortable. Common reactions include tearing up, sneezing and gagging — that’s a hard sell to staff when you’re asking them to test twice a week.
• The existing set-up doesn’t encourage accountability. Employee test results are registered directly onto the gov.uk portal, so building a true picture of infection rates across your business is an ongoing challenge.

Safeguarding staff and heading off unexpected financial setbacks requires a quality testing programme that contains cases before they impact operations. If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to these three key questions, it could be time to switch to a more sustainable screening solution.

1. Do your tests give reliable results and stand up to viral mutations?

To cut the expense of unnecessary quarantine measures, you need accurate, trustworthy test results. With COVID-19 screening, this relies on specificity, which is the test’s ability to eliminate false positives.

A new type of ultra-sensitive lateral flow test allows you to conduct large-scale screening with absolute confidence, offering 99.9% specificity using only a saliva swab. In just 15 minutes, KnowNow reliably identifies infectious employees so you can isolate only those people who present an actual risk to your workforce. The test also responds to viral mutations and, in more than 258 clinical tests, has never produced a false positive.

2. Can your tests detect COVID-19 carriers before they infect others? (Clue: they can’t.)

Because one in three people with COVID-19 show no symptoms, it’s impossible to spot who’s putting your site at risk — until KnowNow. The test uses patented technology that behaves like a human cell, allowing only live viruses to bind to it. A positive result appears when a worker is actively infectious and at no other time.

Why is this a game-changer for your operation? KnowNow lets you single out cases up to two days earlier than standard rapid antigen screening and — crucially — before carriers become highly infectious to others. This early warning system gives you a vital head-start on controlling the spread and avoiding the high price of downtime and disruption.

3. Do your tests show staff you care about quality, wellbeing and their working environment?

Believe it or not, your method of colleague screening is a measure of your company culture. Moving from invasive nasal, throat and tonsil swabs to a fast, easy and pain-free alternative shows a clear commitment to employee health and wellbeing. With KnowNow, staff collect a simple saliva sample, add it to the on-the-spot testing device and read their results within 15 minutes.

The hassle-free approach offers benefits on both sides. A quick and comfortable screening process encourages consistent take-up among your team, so you get a rolling, realistic view of infection rates companywide. It also creates a safe, secure working environment where colleagues can confidently collaborate, focus and get the job done. As an added layer of assurance, KnowNow test outcomes are logged into a bespoke app that can be linked to your site’s access points, allowing only non-infectious employees onsite.

Learn more about KnowNow

If you run a single-site business, don’t risk the consequences of a COVID-19 outbreak. Get to know the only workplace test that assesses employees’ infectiousness in less than 15 minutes — anytime, anywhere.

Visit knownow.com to learn more.

Thanks for reading. Alex Sheppard is the co-founder and CEO of Vatic.We are an Innovate UK and VC backed start-up, supported by the University of Oxford and the Oxford Foundry. We are a team of scientists, engineers and designers solving the world’s most critical healthcare problems.