Verily launches community-based testing programme guide for Covid-19

Alphabet's Verily health sciences subsidiary has introduced community-based toolkit in order to increase the number of tests for the Covid-19 pandemic. Verily's new initiative is currently limited to California in the US.

Verily says the community-based testing programme guide is aimed at helping the government officials, local communities, and health departments to install drive-through testing locations. The guide features a brief framework which includes opening testing sites within seven days, optimising site operations without compromising the safety, and set up automated process.

California Department of Public of Health (CDPH), California Department of Health and Human Services (CDHHS), California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) are some of its key partners for the community-based testing programme guide.

"The guide also includes clinical and operational input from Stanford Medicine, based on its testing protocols and experience addressing COVID-19. We will continue to update the document as we iterate, learn, and launch additional sites," said Verily in a blog post.

"Our team has learned a lot in the early days of this program and has established best practices to inform development of additional testing sites. We are now sharing these learnings to support other organizations' efforts, who may find the information useful, as they expand testing within their own communities," it added.

Alphabet's Verily was one of the first to launch an online-screening platform for the Covid-19 pandemic. The platform comes under Verily's Project Baseline. Google soon launched a full-fledged resource platform the pandemic.