The pandemic from Coronavirus has made the turnover of Amazon, with revenues reaching a share in 2020 386 billion of dollars compared to 280 billion of 2019 (+38%). But between March and September of last year, about 20 thousand employees of the e-commerce giant have contracted the infection. The company has therefore decided to strengthen the controls, creating a molecular nasal swab “at home” (Real-time RT-PCR test) to check the health of its workers.
The test, carried out by the subsidiary STS Lab Holdco and validated with samples from asymptomatic subjects, has been approved by the United States Food and Drug administration. For the moment it will be used only internally, but it is not excluded that in the future it may also be offered on the American market. It is essentially a modified version of another test for Covid-19 made by BGI Genomics, a Chinese company world leader in the sequencing of the human genome. Amazon began using the modified version that would later become its test on August 28, 2020, collecting between late September and early December beyond 560 thousand samples.
The current version of the kit includes a nasal swab that the affected worker can self-administer either under the supervision of a health professional in the workplace or at home. In the latter case, after self-administration, the employee is required to send the swab to the company laboratory, which will analyze it and communicate the result. Amazon has announced that it will test its employees on a voluntary basis every 14 days, under a schedule that is being developed.
At the moment, as mentioned above, it is not clear whether the company intends to put the kit on the market as well. Some officials contacted by the American media have not yet responded regarding this eventuality. For sure there is only that Amazon – which has recently announced the extension of Amazon Care throughout the United States – has long considered medical diagnostics as a possible area for future expansion. In 2018 he tried to buy a start-up that develops home health tests and created a team dedicated to medical diagnostics within his “Grand Challenge” research group, focused on exploring new sectors and / or developing of technologies capable of profoundly changing existing ones.
