Amazon received food and Drug Administration authorization for a covid-19 test made by its subsidiary. It plans to use it for its onsite coronavirus testing programs.

A patient takes their own sample and mails it to a lab lab. The test is done using a nasal self swab.

Amazon plans to use the Amazon real-time rt-pcr test for detecting sars-cov-2 (Amazon test) as part of the company’s overall coronavirus disease 2019.

Some Amazon employees will be automatically given testing appointments around every 14 days. The authorization also describes Amazon’s employee-screening program.

Last summer, Amazon tapped sibay to build its in-house covid-19 testing lab. In October, the company said it had the infrastructure to run tens of thousands of tests for employees each day.

The company began using the modified version that would become the Amazon test on August 28th, 2020. Between late September and early December 2020, it ran over 560,000 samples.