It’s hard to say. Our clients are seeing volume pricing ranging from $7 to $15 per test. Some are as high as $21 per test in lower volumes. There are BD Veritor tests still available on Amazon for $23.95 for a two-pack. Walgreens reports to have pallet pricing but limited supply. And it seems that Cintas may have acquired most of the supply of the newly approved ACON test to sell to their clients. Whether prices are down for the quantity that employers will actually need to offer weekly testing to their employees remains to be seen.
While remote employees who work from home are excluded from the ETS weekly testing requirements for unvaccinated employees, employees who travel to job sites or client locations are not exempt. Supervised testing can present challenges.
Supervised testing can present challenges, but there are several options out there that might work for you (and more appearing every day). One (costlier) option is an at-home test, completed using a telemed provider via video conference. We’ve used Abbott tests with either E-med or Navica successfully. Everlywell provides a similar service. An intermediate option is the BD Veritor at-home test which has an app, so you can have the test proctored but have the result documented electronically. They are currently available (in limited supply) on Amazon. Your counsel will need to provide additional guidance but some early interpretation of the ETS is that other employees or even a client’s employee health and safety rep may be able to proctor the test for your employee, though again, we haven’t heard clear guidance on this yet. Last, but not least, the major labs (LabCorp, Quest) and occupational medicine groups (Concentra, Nova, etc.) offer scheduled rapid testing. These require the employee visiting the clinic weekly – which is time consuming and a visit charge usually applies. We expect to see the menu of solutions expanding over the next few weeks.
The answer is simple: blast top-down messaging across your organization using every channel possible to authentically and enthusiastically support vaccination. Show your CEO, your regional managers, your spokesperson, celebrities your employees admire, even your mascot getting vaccinated. Celebrate locations with high vaccination rates, and use the Dec. 5th deadline to create a sense of urgency around getting the shot.
Yes. The new OSHA ETS says that unvaccinated people who test positive for COVID are exempt from weekly testing for 90 days from the date of their first positive test result. ZHH & Zedic’s Vaccination & Testing Tracking system will automatically exempt any employee who uploads a COVID positive test, for 90 days from the date they were tested. After 90 days, they’ll be back on the weekly testing schedule - at least until they (hopefully) get vaccinated.
As soon as an employee inputs their vaccination information showing that they’re fully vaccinated, they’ll be marked as such in the ZHH/Zedic dashboard. If you have a dashboard configured just to show you unvaccinated employees who require weekly testing, they’ll be removed from that dashboard as soon as they’re two weeks out from their final dose.
