As Gov. Greg Abbott begins to investigate avenues to reopen portions of the state, he insists he will only do so by making sure companies and workers are safe to gather from further spread of the novel coronavirus. That priority stretches across the country, with Silicon Valley giants working to figure out a master plan for this.
But just a few miles north of San Antonio, a local nano company in San Marcos says it’s already got a system that’s about a month away from startup.
Quantum Materials has a phone app that tracks and traces your status with COVID-19, which will help companies and health care professionals authenticate whether you are safe to re-emerge from the stay home orders.
Quantum already makes solutions to protect companies from counterfeiting operations using a digital marker. Now it wants to use a similar platform it’s calling GDX Health I.D. to authenticate COVID-19 test results to make sure those who have the virus stay home, but also those who don’t are free to return to work.
“It was fairly easy to adapt it for it to be a solution for tracking these test results, and to be able to provide an immunity certificate or an electronic format that would allow people to be able to return to work," Stephen Squires, the founder and CEO of Quantum, said.
Map: Track COVID-19 cases in Texas, county-by-county updates
The need for authentication of test results and tracking comes after failures worldwide of faulty test kits, as well as the lack of a vaccine. Countries like the U.K. experienced only a 30% accuracy rate with their widely used test kits, creating more spread, instead of intelligence of where the virus was tracking.
GDX Health I.D. is accessible on cellphones by both the health provider and the patient.
“They then take the record of the test kit that was used for their testing, so it also will start to provide some of data tracking of which tests are turning out to be accurate and which ones aren’t.”
The company says their system would monitor patient’s tests, authenticate them and even track through the time when a vaccine might be administered, providing “proof” of cleared status, without the potential for fraud or forgery of testing.
Squires says without a comprehensive and uniform approach, things could get messy.
“I think we all want to get back to work. I mean, we all want to get out of quarantine. But, you know, this could be one of the situations where haste makes waste. If we return too soon and if we don’t have good tracking it, we could wind up in a worse situation,” he said.
Les Paul runs the global sales and marketing arm of Quantum Materials Corporation. He says he has been in talks with the Abbott administration which wants a collaboration of people working to provide the plan to start normalizing Texas activity.
“They are investigating the integrity of the company and [sic] that we can do it," Paul said.
The company says unlike other companies that only now are starting to put together technology for this, theirs could be ready to go on June 1, with beta testing underway in the next month.