Three Steps to Smart COVID-19 Testing: A Guide for Employers

Executive Summary

This guide is designed to help businesses and other organizations develop appropriate Covid-19 testing plans to enable safe operations during the pandemic. Testing is one of several important measures to help reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus and keep workers, customers, and others as healthy as possible. There is no ideal one-size-fits-all testing strategy. This guide walks you through the three key steps to shape a testing plan best suited to your organization’s needs:

As facts on the ground change, so will your risk assessment. As such, you need to be prepared to change strategies over time – whether due to localized outbreaks or because most of your employees have been vaccinated. However, even as vaccines become more available, testing will remain important. Not everyone will seek vaccination, the vaccines do not guarantee complete protection from infection and spread, and new variants of the virus that causes Covid-19 may not be covered by available vaccines.

This guide will help you identify a testing strategy that makes sense for your specific situation, understand the logistics involved in setting up that strategy, and provide examples of and advice on implementation.