In a first for U.S. airports, the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) is piloting rapid coronavirus testing for flight crews and terminal employees.
The goal is to eventually scale the program up and allow passengers to get tested as well, but figuring out how to accommodate potentially thousands of tests per day could be a challenge.
"The thing that we're looking to get out of this is scalability," Doug Yakel, public information officer for SFO, told Cheddar. "Although initially this program is designed just for employees at the airport, we want to take some of the lessons that we learned here and think about applying them to a larger audience, namely passengers."
The hope is that rapid testing will allow the beleaguered airline industry to embrace a new post-COVID reality.
"If you think about the way air travel is changing, there's a new normal that's emerging," Yakel said. "We envision that some sort of health certification is going to be a part of that."
The way it works now is that employees register and then visit a designated testing site within the terminal. Once they're tested using a nasal swab, they wait in a set area until the results arrive — sometimes as quickly as 15 minutes.
Yakel said the goal is for employees to come to the testing location and know their status before they leave the premises.
Currently, employees can pay for the test through their insurance, or their employers can pre-purchase a block of tests for a set number of workers.
The airport is currently testing fewer than 50 people per day but plans to scale up quickly.
"We think we have the capacity for several hundred a day, but obviously if you introduce a much larger audience you need the facilities, you need the personnel, you need everything that goes with it to scale it up, but we're off to a good start," Yakel said.
For now, SFO has not a set timeline for opening the testing site to passengers.
Elon Musk may not have founded Tesla, but he has become the company, and it’s become him. Now sales are plummeting. Is he toxic for the Tesla?
About 780,000 pressure washers sold at retailers like Home Depot are being recalled across the U.S. and Canada, due to a projectile hazard that has resulted in fractures and other injuries among some consumers.
Europeans upset with Elon Musk still aren’t buying his electric cars, adding to a long losing streak for his company.
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie ahead of the board considering the largest railroad merger ever proposed.
Ford is recalling more than 355,000 of its pickup trucks across the U.S. because of an instrument panel display failure that’s resulted in critical information, like warning lights and vehicle speed, not showing up on the dashboard.
Nvidia reported a 56% increase in second-quarter revenue and a 59% rise in net income compared to a year ago.
The Rev. Al Sharpton is set to lead a protest march on Wall Street to urge corporate America to resist the Trump administration’s campaign to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The New York civil rights leader will join clergy, labor and community leaders Thursday in a demonstration through Manhattan’s Financial District that’s timed with the anniversary of the Civil Rights-era March on Washington in 1963. Sharpton called DEI the “civil rights fight of our generation." He and other Black leaders have called for boycotting American retailers that scaled backed policies and programs aimed at bolstering diversity and reducing discrimination in their ranks.
President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a $1.2 billion contract to build and operate what's expected to become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex to a tiny Virginia firm with no experience running correction facilities.
Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos claims audiences don't want to watch Netflix movies in theaters, but that seems not to be the case recently.
Chipmaker Nvidia is poised to release a quarterly report that could provide a better sense of whether the stock market has been riding an overhyped artificial intelligence bubble or is being propelled by a technological boom that’s still gathering momentum.
