How a small Michigan company reopened, averting a coronavirus outbreak

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United Precision Products is using a test that uncovered six infected carriers in its workforce.

United Precision Products, a Michigan machine tool plant, makes aircraft engine parts so exact that they come within one or two ten-thousandths of an inch of their designs.

On April 15, United Precision Products brought its 41 employees to the company parking lot at staggered intervals. They stayed in their cars while spitting into vials with bar codes that keep the results confidential. Those vials were sent to DxTerity, a private Los Angeles testing firm, and a day or two later, the results were in: Two employees tested strongly positive for the coronavirus — one who had been sick earlier and one who was asymptomatic and knew nothing of the infection.

“He would have been back in the workplace even though he was still a carrier,” Bloom said. “That [test] definitely worked out in our favor.”Six days later, the worker tested positive yet again. “To me that shows there’s a problem still out there,” Bloom said in an interview last month. Albert Ko, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health, said the priority for testing should be places where there have been outbreaks: nursing homes, prisons and densely packed poor communities of color.

Reopening the nation’s economy means doing on a massive scale what United Precision Products is doing in its parking lot.“To allow people to return to work and reopen the economy before there is an effective vaccine, our public health, government, and business leaders need information about who has COVID-19, who needs to be isolated or quarantined, and who may be immune due to previous infection,” Sen.

Bloom said frequent testing also helps deal with “the fear factor that everybody has, even those who don’t have the virus.”

 

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