Amazon Care, the medical care arm for Amazon’s employees, has recently partnered with Bill Gates-backed research program SCAN to pick up and deliver at-home coronavirus test kits in Seattle.
As reported first by CNBC, Amazon is going to be working with Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN, a new research initiative backed in part by the Gates Foundation that will distribute at-home coronavirus assessment kits, and then deliver the collected samples to FDA-approved test facilities. Amazon Care, the health arm formed by Amazon initially for internal employee care, will be handling the delivery of the kits, as well as transportation of collected samples to the test labs.
SCAN is a group of medical, public health and research organizations as well as a team of hospitals and health organizations that created the Seattle Flu Study, a similar project meant to study the spread of the traditional seasonal flu within the community. The research and data modeling work done for that study have been adapted to the study of COVID-19, and the flu study has been put on hold while researchers focus on the pandemic instead.
Under the initiative, SCAN will be collecting nasal swabs from a sample of people across King County and Seattle to learn how the infection is spreading in communities. The Amazon Care drivers who are doing the test kit drop-offs and deliveries are specifically trained in the proper handling of sensitive medical materials, and the SCAN project is for a limited research endeavor undertaken in order to help “understand how coronavirus is spreading in the Greater Seattle area.”
King County, part of Washington state, is one of the worst-hit places by the outbreak in the United States.
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