At-home COVID tests should be part of your return to work plans

As companies begin thinking about back-to-the-office safety initiatives, frequent COVID testing should be part of their strategies.

Ninety percent of consumers would use an at-home COVID-19 test and half would use a test at least once per month, according to a survey conducted by Applied Marketing Science, a market research and consulting firm.In response, 83% of employers said they would be interested in providing testing services for employees.

“As we near the one-year mark of the global shutdown, people are desperate for life to return to normal,” John Mitchell, president and managing principal of AMS, said in a release. “Our research shows how we can increase accessibility to testing, giving health officials more targeted ways to fight the pandemic and helping more schools, public services and businesses reopen.”

More than half of employers would be extremely likely to adopt an app based on at-home COVID tests, the survey found. First, the employee would watch an instructional video on an app that would give them step-by-step instructions on how to administer the test. Then, the employee would test themselves and use the app to receive the results.

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The benefit for employers is not only to facilitate the re-opening of businesses, but to keep infection rates low once they do, according to Carmel Dibner, a principal at Applied Marketing Science.

“Most employers would want testing between once a week to once a month,” she says. “They’re particularly interested in testing in case an employee came in contact with someone who had a confirmed COVID infection or if an employee was suspected to have COVID-19 and wanted to come back to the workplace.”

To finance the effort, 33% of employers would consider paying for the tests entirely and 66% of employers would pay between $5-35 per test, the survey found.

In previous months, consumers have been able to purchase test kits that allow them to collect a sample at home and mail it to a lab, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. But those kits typically cost more than $100, and patients have to wait a few days for the results. Recently, the Food and Drug Administration has given emergency use authorization to five at-home tests in an effort to bring them to market quickly due to the severity of the pandemic. The market price of the approved tests range from $30 to $50.

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While 35% of workplaces do not currently have a firm reopening plan, 68% of employers want workers in the office at least three days per week, when it is safe to do so, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. In order to achieve this, experts have rolled out a number of protocols including vaccine incentives, mandatory social distancing and mask wearing.

It’s too soon to tell what awaits the workforce once the world returns to its new normal, but any and all safety precautions are a step in the right direction.

“Protection is a must, not a nice to have,” says Gary Pearce, chief risk architect at Aclaimant, a workplace safety and risk management platform. “If you can't demonstrate that you're protecting your own people, you're not going to be able to keep employees.”