One of our fastest growing customer populations have been film production companies looking to provide COVID-19 screening and testing services.
Hollywood, Oklahoma to Atlanta, and all parts in between, the entertainment business is coming back to life thanks to health-care consultants who are playing a supporting role guiding the industry to a safe reopening.
Consultants work with production managers to develop a network of suppliers and methodologies for testing based on set location, proximity to a testing site and other considerations.
For example: A movie being shot in a remote location that lacks refrigeration for keeping viral media at a safe temperature may opt to use either saline collection kits or a transport media free rapid test platform.
Some of our production managers have aligned themselves with a nearby lab or university lab to run their qPCR assay tests, while others have constructed on the set screening labs for greater control and efficiencies.
Most of the calls we field are from film crews looking for rapid screening tools as well as qPCR testing supplies.
A rapid screening antibody test like the one we offer from OrientGene/Healgen can being used to identify asymptomatic carriers who can be detected by a positive IgM test result.
These actors, crew and extras can then be sent to obtain a follow-up PCR test result to determine their availability to report to work or quarantine.
Many more film studios come to us for their viral transport media kits and swabs.
The NEST Scientific 202017 sample collection kit is on pace to win an Oscar this year as the most popular VTM collection kit we offer.
Each test kit comes with a 10mL kpa 95 rated transport tube and screw cap filled with 3mL of FDA approved viral transport medium, and a sterile, individually wrapped NP swab.
Small, boutique films are buying NEST Scientific collection kits in boxes of one hundred at a time, while larger, blockbuster film projects have bought them by the pallet of eight-thousand kits (presumably for large crowd scenes with many extras).
Looking for something different?
Stellar Scientific has OP swabs, transport tubes with saline, ITM (inactivating transport media) and new saliva collection kits from NEST Scientific as well.
The red carpet may not be in your future, but your customers will enjoy using the same COVID-19 testing kits as their favorite silver-screen stars.
We know you’d love to know whose noses have been tickled by one of our swabs……