Mark Evans may just have the fastest tests in the west.
In La Cañada, Calif., where Evans is associate superintendent of the school district, schools administer Covid-19 tests five times a week. By 5 p.m., they’ve been dropped off at a lab for processing. And most days, Evans says, he has results in hand before 7 a.m. — in time for him to call up parents and let them know if their kids can head into school.
In part, that timeline is thanks to a trick of luck: A district employee lives next to the lab where tests are processed, and she drops them off herself each night. But there’s a second element that keeps turnarounds tight, not just for La Cañada, but all California schools. In late October, the state began to route much of its school test reporting through a single vendor: Color, a company that before the pandemic was best known for its genomic testing and counseling platforms.
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