Covid -19 Environmental and Surfacing testing development

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Andersen Caledonia's project is to expand our Coronavirus (CV) environmental testing capability beyond hospitals to benefit the wider community. Recent published data has shown that this Coronavirus(Covid-19) can survive on surfaces for many days depending on environmental conditions: e.g. A set of tests on the cruise ship the Diamond Princess found the virus 17 days after all passengers and crew had left. It is not known how common the transmission of the CV is via surfaces but the possibility of transmission from surface to hand to mouth has been shown.By providing testing information to organisations such as GP surgeries, care homes, pharmacists, supermarkets, bus fleet owners, dentists and possibly to student residences, we can enable them to ensure that their facilities stay clean of the virus as far as possible. It is much better that we keep especially high-risk people free of the virus than to work tirelessly to try and save them post-infection. We also need to make everyone feel that they can live their life in social isolation without it becoming a prison.The testing market will be smaller than initially planned as it has become clear that testing needs to be integrated with closing down outbreaks and not as a general test. This is most important in hospital settings where around 15% of all fatal infections have occurred.As a project extension and to accelerate commercial application we consider that combining human and surface testing will allow a more comprehensive outbreak track and trace system as done in Asia but not so far in Europe.Testing for CV in the environment requires the collection of samples using swabs from high risk surfaces. The swabs are then transported in cool boxes back to our laboratory for testing using a QPCR machine. This machine can look for exactly the DNA/RNA of COVID-19 virus and can identify as little as 100 strands. A single human cell has 92 strands of DNA / RNA.Andersen Caledonia are already a key supplier to the NHS: sterilising gowns and testing hospitals for environmental contamination. Our two testing laboratories are UKAS accredited and serve the whole of the UK. Testing for CV is not without risks to the staff, but our whole team have enthusiastically given their time to develop our capability and we have carefully minimised risks.In addition to our staff we have been able to build our testing service within a matter of weeks due to the invaluable support of our supply base. I am pleased to say that our whole supply base of swabs, viral transport media, QPCR machine and reagents has been sourced from UK manufacturers. We thank them for their support !