ASSET is highlighting the good work of businesses across the Lone Star State that are stepping up to serve their communities and employees during the COVID-19 pandemic as part of our #TXBusinessCares series. Thanks to ASSET coalition member ABC Texas and its Southeast Texas Chapter for sharing Tiger Rentals’ story.
Tiger has been around since 1995, focusing on workplace safety, emergency services and equipment rentals. Many of our clients are in the upstream, midstream and downstream petrochemical industry, and we’ve always been very nimble and worked around disasters, from hurricanes and well blowouts to fires and explosions. We are in the business of solving problems for our customers, identifying unmet needs and thinking outside the box to help them get met. While most people tend to run from a fire, we’ve always been in the business of running towards it.
Although the oil and gas industry has seen difficult days recently, it hasn’t completely shut down. It’s an essential industry, providing everything from gas for our cars to feeding the power plants that keep our lights on to the raw materials we need to manufacture so many of our consumer products.
Many facilities, however, ran into trouble early on. COVID presents a timing issue because of the long lead time between infection and presenting symptoms (if an individual shows symptoms at all). People are typically COVID-positive four to five days before showing symptoms, and contagious about 12 hours before showing symptoms. Social distancing can be tough to accomplish because of the type of work and the sites. That makes the need for testing extremely important. But we all know how difficult it has been to obtain testing. For a while, it didn’t matter whether you wanted a test or not. If you weren’t exhibiting symptoms, you couldn’t get a COVID test.
In our conversations with our customers, the same theme kept coming up. People want to work but they want to do it safely. There are a lot of concerns around that—aside from your standard safety operations, you’ve now got to consider how you keep your workforce safe from COVID. No one knows yet what potential liability issues will arise from the pandemic, particularly because as essential industries, these companies have been operating throughout this crisis.
We kept seeing the business to business need to test employees, so we found a way to partner with labs that have been certified through the FDA’s Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) program to offer both COVID molecular and antibody testing. This helps employers determine who may have an active infection (whether symptomatic or not) and who has already been infected so they can take the appropriate precautions. We partner with many of our clients to attain affordable testing that helps them, their subcontractors and the work force industry get back to work faster. In some cases, we’ve even been able to offer the testing at a fraction of the cost.
We ran into some hurdles early on. As soon as the government would release an authorized testing mechanism, almost overnight you couldn’t get the components to run it. So, we decided to invest in this process and bought our own machines to make it happen in partnership with CLIA-certified labs, where we look for capacity to process the tests.
We bring medical staff and logistical people on site to collect the samples and get them to the lab. Processing for COVID tests typically takes about 48 hours, but the antibody results are received on site. It’s a much quicker process than we’ve seen with other testing capabilities. So far, we’ve gotten great feedback and have deployed thousands of tests across multiple different areas in North America, testing people who are largely asymptomatic to keep them from infecting others if they are COVID-positive.
We’re all eager for things to get back to normal and for everyone to be able to get back to work. We will continue to provide information and data to our clients so they can make decisions on how to resume work and move forward. For more information visit tigerCOVIDtesting.com or call +1 (800) 971-3559.