As many states begin to reopen, it is crucial that businesses adopt plans for COVID-19 surface testing to assure a safe environment for their workers and customers. This helps alleviate some of the fears that people have returning to work and can increase business if your customers know they are in a verified COVID-19-free environment. SARS-COV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, can potentially survive on a multitude of surfaces for days. This alone makes it incredibly important to perform COVID-19 surface sampling on touch points for the SARS-COV-2 virus.

The two main types of surface samples are post-cleaning evaluations and ongoing monitoring for COVID-19. For post-cleaning samples your first step will be hiring a qualified remediation company to come and disinfect your place of business. You will then proceed to have a certified industrial hygienist or similarly qualified inspector come and perform COVID-19 surface sampling primarily on touchpoints. For a more cost-effective test, we are able to provide pooled testing of all your surfaces.

Ongoing monitoring has all the same testing principles, but is typically done on a schedule to monitor for possible contamination to prevent an outbreak in a place of business. Usually an ongoing monitoring COVID-19 surface testing schedule will be set up after the initial post cleaning testing was done to verify that the area remains clean after the initial disinfection.

As previously mentioned, we are able to provide both single-site samples and pooled composite surface samples. Single-site COVID-19 surface samples use one swab to sample multiple touchpoints in a room, while pooled COVID-19 samples combine multiple single-site swabs from different areas into a single analysis. Pooled surface testing for COVID-19 is a great and cost-efficient way to screen an area for reentry or continued occupancy. If you have a positive result from a pooled sample, we can reanalyze each of the individual swabs to determine which location was positive without having to resample. By doing this you can potentially sample the surfaces of an entire area for near the cost of one analysis, freeing up more resources for sampling other locations for COVID-19.

Assured Bio Labs can provide you with everything you need to complete your COVID-19 surface sampling along with industry leading turn-around times. We stock the needed surface sampling swabs as well as our cutting-edge patented M-TRAP® technology used for air sampling. We also sell all the shipping supplies you need to get your sample to our lab safely and intact, including shippable cooler packages and mylar bags. Air pumps, including our patented WhisperCare®, and adapters are available for purchase as well. Our standard turnaround time is 48-72 hours, but for an extra fee we are able to provide results the same day. All of this information and more can be found on www.assuredbio.com/covid-19-environmental-testing-program. We hope we can provide you with all the help you need in this ever-evolving and stressful time.