Amazon will help Seattle residents receive at-home COVID-19 testing

Bill Gates is helping fund the public testing effort in Seattle

Amazon will carry out the test deliveries and pickup through its existing Amazon Care arm, an internal healthcare platform dedicated to Amazon employees and their families. Yet COVID-19 testing won’t be restricted to just Amazon employees. Anyone in the Seattle area will be eligible through SCAN, including children and those who aren’t displaying flu-like symptoms but may be asymptomatic. According to CNBC, “All the couriers involved have been trained in handling medical material, and they will distribute the self-swab kits to the homes of those who have requested them.”

“Responding to the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis must be a community effort and requires support from both the private and public sectors,” Kristen Helton, the director of Amazon Care, told CNBC in a statement. “We are grateful to be surrounded by a strong community of public health, global health and academic leaders and are eager to leverage Amazon Care’s infrastructure and logistics capabilities to support this local effort.”

Seattle and the surrounding area of King County have been among the hardest-hit metropolitan area in the US during the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 2,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 100 deaths.

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