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Baseline COVID-19 Pilot Program shares early screening and testing progress
Thursday, March 19, 2020
The
Baseline COVID-19 Pilot Program
launched operations this week with an online screening tool and sample collection sites in the Bay Area. The early days of the pilot have been focused on an end-to-end protocol and playbook that can scale. A critical part of this process is adjusting the screening and scheduling of individuals to prioritize those at highest risk, as identified by the CA Department of Public Health (CDPH), to match with testing supply and lab analysis capacity and to prevent on-site congestion
—
work that is facilitated through the Baseline Platform. Our team is working in partnership with local, state, and federal public health officials to rapidly establish a robust public health delivery framework that could extend to other sites.
We’ve learned a lot over the past few days and want to share early results and learnings from our initial screening and testing efforts.*
Pop-up testing sites
We’ve established multiple Bay Area sites, staffed by healthcare professionals and Verily team members, including two large expo centers that facilitate drive through screening and sample collection. In the first days of on-site testing, more than 130 individuals were tested, with over 350 more scheduled for appointments this week. Our lab partners are analyzing the samples, and we expect the results to be available for those already tested in the coming days.
Site personnel in personal protective equipment (PPE) direct individuals to mobile testing site.
Online triage tool
More than 12,000 individuals have completed the public health screener through the online tool since launch. The screener is dynamic and the criteria may change over time based on epidemiological data and government directives. As we scale testing at these facilities and begin opening new ones, we will be adjusting the triage algorithm in response to CDPH objectives.
This program is meant to reduce the burden on our hospital system and is complementary to testing happening in a clinical care situation. People with acute symptoms need acute triage and should not visit the sample collection sites, as the sites are not prepared to provide medical care.
In order to safely execute each part of our workflow, we are continuing to make improvements and adapt on-site as we learn, while focusing on protecting individual privacy and ensuring safety for the teams. Building on learnings from these critical first few days, we expect an increase in our testing capacity in the coming days. Please check back for updates on the Baseline COVID-19 Pilot Program at
projectbaseline.com/covid-19
.
*
Note, statistics are based on data collected as of Wednesday, March 17.
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