We’re sharing this update from our friends at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Providence. Their new testing initiative has helped businesses across New England get up and running again, safely.
COVID-19 has done significant harm to almost every American industry. It’s kept people out of schools, out of restaurants, and the office. The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) in Providence provides flexible office spaces for entrepreneurs, and the COVID pandemic posed an immediate threat to this ecosystem. In the absence of an available vaccine, CIC focused on how we could all return to the office safely.
Research by Dr. Michael Mina at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health, finds that testing individuals frequently, regardless of symptoms, could be an effective solution. Mina asserts that testing the same individuals in a population every three days, or even every week, would be enough to effectively stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 over time.
These approaches have so far been cost prohibitive, unreliable, or not widely available. The capacity to process these tests is not the issue, as labs sit vacant with open capacity. We know that the private sector can solve this by applying logistical know-how – the more demand we fill for tests, the cheaper the tests become, the more the market is able to widen access to testing.
CIC partnered with The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to test our clients and have worked with them to solve the many logistical hurdles. CIC is now able to offer our tenants testing at a lower cost than they would pay at their local Urgent Care, with a faster turnaround on results. Many tenants now have weekly testing regimens, giving employers and employees confidence in their safety when returning to the office.
CIC introduced this service to others through a new subsidiary, CIC Health which has allowed schools and nursing homes across New England access to affordable testing. Other businesses face their own crises, and we have helped them set up their own testing sites and procedures.
If you’re interested in offering testing at your organization, visit