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XMeet the Labs Tasked with Making LA's COVID Testing Mandate Work
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.

Los Angeles health care workers and school faculty (who are unable to get vaccinated) are now mandated by the state to get tested regularly. In the city and county, municipal employees from bus drivers to police officers are also required to be tested regularly if they do not get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, commercial labs, medical labs and public health labs are tasked with making sure the tests get processed and rapidly turned around. PCR tests, the most accurate kind of COVID-19 test that looks for viral RNA, are only useful if results are given within two days of taking the sample. Any longer than that, and California residents who unknowingly have the virus risk spreading it to more people.
"If it's longer than [two days] then the test results become less useful from a public health perspective," said Jeff Klausner, an infectious disease expert and member of the state's coronavirus testing task force. "The idea initially was to use contact tracing to find out who was positive as fast as possible to disrupt the chain of transmission. But given the huge number of cases that wasn't useful."
Of course, even two days of turnaround time isn't a foolproof way to stop the coronavirus from spreading. Someone could give a sample on one day, contract the virus later that day, and not know until a week later when they take another PCR test. But the state sees it as a more efficient method than contact tracing.
The two-day turnaround time has forced labs to stay open 24/7, with lab workers taking shifts under a rotating cast of managers. Some companies, like SummerBio, have automated the testing process to turn around thousands of results in the span of two days. It's a leap from the start of the pandemic, when companies struggling with inefficient supply were struggling to process tests any shorter than a week.
Labs processed nearly 1.6 million COVID-19 tests for Californians between Aug. 8 and Aug. 14, a big jump from the peak of the pandemic last winter, when labs were processing around half a million tests a day. That number will need to grow exponentially, as mandates send millions of California students and workers to testing sites as the delta variant surges. Klausner said the state has the capacity to process about 4 to 5 million tests a week.
"Right now we're in a way different place than we were [in] March 2020 when it made sense to declare a state of emergency to get prepared," Klausner, a member of the California coronavirus testing task force, said. "Now it doesn't make sense to continue the state of emergency. And we have a lot of laboratory capacity and there's a lot of underutilization."
That's not to say the state may run into problems down the line. Supply shortages, malfunctions in labs that are processing the bulk of tests could net false-positive COVID-19 results, or bring us back to the beginning of the pandemic, when test results took weeks to return and public officials scrambled to create the infrastructure to support mass testing amid supply shortages.
This could also further fuel the spread of the hyper-contagious delta variant.
The California Department of Public Health said it could not provide an estimate on how many workers in California were bound by a testing mandate.
"The number of people mandated to get tested on a regular basis is determined by those who eventually become vaccinated and those who remain unvaccinated. Therefore, it is a fluid number," a department representative said by email.
Here are the top ten labs in the state and how quickly they turned tests for the week of Aug. 8:
SummerBio
- TESTS PERFORMED: 267,405
- RESULTS WITHIN TWO DAYS: 99%
- RESULTS AFTER 2 DAYS: 1%
SummerBio, which has contracted with the Los Angeles School District, to test students and employees was responsible for approximately 8% of all COVID-19 testing in the first week of August. The company, based in Menlo Park, CA, was founded in 2020 and quickly raised $7.3 million to test for the coronavirus. While LAUSD is its biggest customer, the company has also partnered with UCLA, San Diego Unified School District, and a slew of large companies.
Fulgent Genetics
- TESTS PERFORMED: 146,836
- RESULTS WITHIN TWO DAYS: 99%
- RESULTS AFTER 2 DAYS: 1%
The ten-year-old diagnostics company Fulgent Genetics has long been involved in genetic testing to screen for hereditary conditions and cancers. It has leveraged its partnerships with hospitals, large companies and cities to test for COVID.
Valencia Branch Lab
- TESTS PERFORMED: 118,184
- RESULTS WITHIN TWO DAYS: 95%
- RESULTS AFTER 2 DAYS: 5%
Valencia Branch Lab is a public health laboratory north of Los Angeles that has partnered with Color, a startup creating testing kits for hereditary health problems that pivoted to COVID testing during the pandemic. In February, the California Department of Public Health announced multiple samples at the lab were either incorrectly processed or unable to be processed due to lab errors, but the company in charge of the lab said those errors have since been resolved.
Kaiser SoCal
- TESTS PERFORMED: 87,523
- RESULTS WITHIN TWO DAYS: 100%
- RESULTS AFTER 2 DAYS: 0%
Kaiser SoCal, which comprises 15 hospitals across Southern California, has taken on the lion's share of COVID-19 testing across all medical institutions in the state. The group has two labs that can process 280,000 tests a week.
Quest
- TESTS: 77,232
- RESULTS WITHIN TWO DAYS: 89%
- RESULTS AFTER 2 DAYS: 11%
Quest Diagnostics, another senior diagnostics company that has been doing bloodwork long before the pandemic, quickly added COVID-19 testing to its slew of deliverables. The company's partnership with grocery stores like Safeway and Vons have allowed it to expand their reach.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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Good News Piles Up for VinFast
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle startup with headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles, is gathering serious momentum in the United States. In the last 7 days the company has announced a partnership with Taiwan-based solid state battery company ProLogium, opened 6 stores in California, and secured $1.2 billion in incentives for a manufacturing plant in North Carolina.
The partnership with ProLogium comes in the form of a memorandum of understanding, and an investment from the EV hopeful valued in the “tens of millions” of dollars. The memo outlines a business structure that gives VinFast priority to purchase ProLogium’s solid state battery packs and ancillary technology.
ProLogium will produce the solid-state batteries in one of its Asian manufacturing facilities, and—if all goes well—the batteries could be available in VinFast electric vehicles by 2023. A successful partnership could put VinFast on pace to be the first EV manufacturer with solid state battery tech in their cars.
The battery’s technical specifications have not been released —but solid-state technology offers myriad advantages over traditional lithium-ion architecture. Benefits include faster charging, better thermal properties, and potentially higher range. If the company can deliver on a 2023 timeline, they may be the first to market, ahead of hopefuls such as QuantumScape, Solid Power, and Mullen. The race is on. Stay tuned.
VinFast opened six stores this week in California, with locations in Santa Monica, San Mateo, La Jolla, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and the Bay Area. The showrooms are stocked with the company’s first two EV’s, the VF 8 and VF 9. Why the numbers start at 8 is anyone’s guess, but the VF 8 is a 5-seat AWD SUV with an expected range of just over 300 miles and a price tag starting at $40,700. The VF 9 is a full-sized SUV with 3 rows of seating, a max range of 369 miles, and a base price of $55,500.
VinFast showrooms will also likely serve as a forum for the company to explain its confusing battery leasing program. Yes, in addition to the sticker prices listed above, buyers will need to lease the battery packs for their cars. As Forbes reported:
The basic plan comes in at $35 a month for the VF 8 and $44 for the VF 9. Motorists will get up to 310 miles of free use each month. Motorists who go above that will pay an additional 11 cents per mile for the VF 8 and 15 cents with the VF 9. An alternate, all-you-can-drive plan will run $110 a month for the VF 8 and $160 for the VF 9.
VinFast’s good week was capped by the announcement that the company had secured $1.2 billion in incentives from the state of North Carolina to build a factory in Chatham County — the largest economic incentive package in state history. VinFast is planning for the plant to cover 2,000 acres, allowing for production of up to 150,000 vehicles per year. Construction is scheduled to start before the end of 2022 and production may come online as early as July 2024.
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Inside Ring's Cozy, Creepy Relationship with Law Enforcement
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Ring, the camera doorbell company owned by Amazon, is under scrutiny after admitting to sharing users' footage with law enforcement 11 times so far this year without their explicit consent.
Founded by former “Shark Tank” entrepreneur hopeful James Siminoff, Ring launched in Santa Monica in 2012 and was acquired by Amazon – which has its own smart home and surveillance network ambitions – in 2018 for reportedly north of $1 billion.
Ring’s push to become cozy with the cops is spooking privacy experts and policymakers alike. It’s become a bipartisan issue – elected officials on either side of the aisle have sponsored or are lobbying bills that could reduce the scope of what private companies collect and share with law enforcement. But a bill that would block police from surveilling people’s internet habits without warrants was narrowly defeated two years ago, and there is no comprehensive federal regulation regarding what companies can – or can’t – share with police and how they should notify users.
“The ubiquity of straight to consumer surveillance technology has happened so fast and the relationships from the very start have been so cozy with police,” Electronic Frontier Foundation policy analyst Matthew Guariglia told dot.LA. “It's been so untransparent to some extent, that we really have not caught up yet.”
Amazon’s vice president of public policy Brian Huseman and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Ma.) exchanged dueling letters this week after Markey called Ring out for sharing data with police and asked for more information about the company’s privacy practices.
Huseman did not agree to several of Markey’s demands, including commitments to not accept financial contributions from policing agencies or allow immigration officials to access Ring recordings. Amazon also refuses to commit to never participating in police sting operations.
Ring's doorbell camera. Credit: Ring dot.la
One of Ring’s more contentious features is its Neighbors app, which comes free with a Ring device, and its companion app for public safety agencies, called Neighbors Public Safety Service (NPSS), where police can post “requests for assistance” where they provide some details of alleged crimes and ask users to publicly comment tips or privately share footage from Ring devices.
“I agree there are a lot of potential harms that might come with that type of function,” said Max Isaacs, a staff civil rights attorney for the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law.
Guariglia said there’s seemingly no limit to the amount of footage police can get. He also noted he’s seen requests for up to eight hours. “They can use that footage in any way they want [and] they can forward it to other departments,” he said. “They might tell you they're investigating a car break-in. But what happens if your neighbor is undocumented, are they free to forward that footage to ICE?”
Ring said over 2,600 law enforcement agencies are on the NPSS platform, over a fivefold increase from 2019, growth which could in part be attributed to Ring's policy of giving law enforcement officials freebies in exchange for hawking their products. Last year, Ring Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth told dot.LA "our customer is not the police department."
Ring’s policy is that it only allows agencies to see camera footage if the owner agrees, or police get a warrant. But it says it's allowed to share video without user consent if there’s an “emergency,” which is vaguely defined as “cases involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”
Markey asked Huseman and Ring to clarify, but the company refused to elaborate.
In an email statement to dot.LA, Ring said, "it’s simply untrue that Ring gives anyone unfettered access to customer data or video, as we have repeatedly made clear to our customers and others. The law authorizes companies like Ring to provide information to government entities if the company believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person, such as a kidnapping or an attempted murder, requires disclosure without delay. Ring faithfully applies that legal standard."
“Police can request footage without a warrant without consent of the user, if they and Ring decide the situation was extreme enough,” said Guariglia. “I don't know who elected them the arbiters of what an emergency is, and what requires the use of emergency Ring footage as quickly as possible. But apparently, it's them.”
Ring's "Always Home Cam." Credit: Ringdot.la
Max Isaacs worked on a December 2021 audit conducted by the Policing Project and commissioned by Ring (Isaacs told dot.LA NYU donated the $25,000 Ring paid for the study to a racial justice nonprofit) which found that more than 10 million people use Neighbors every month. He said Ring did take some of the Policing Project’s advice, including working to make the process of police requesting footage more transparent.
“What Ring has done through the audit is taking the first step; it’s modified some of its practices in a way that we think is a step in the right direction,” Isaacs told dot.LA. “What has to happen now is for policymakers to begin studying, learning from this transparency, learning how police are using this tool and creating sensible safeguards and rules for police to follow so that we can prevent some of the misuse and privacy implications that advocates are concerned about.”
Matthew Guariglia said the EFF wants Ring to add more public service groups to the app, like homeless outreach groups, fire departments and even animal control. He also said EFF recommends Ring make two key changes: firstly, turning on end-to-end encryption by default for users. People can turn this on in their app but only if they know where to find the setting and even understand the importance of encrypting their data.
Encryption “is not a perfect solution, but it's much safer and more verifiable than the case where the data is sitting on their servers and they can give it to whomever they want,” Dr. Clifford Neuman, director of USC’s Center for Computer Systems and Security told dot.LA.
Another thing the EFF says Ring needs to fix is ending default audio collection. Guariglia told dot.LA a study of Ring devices by Consumer Reports found that Ring doorbells can record audio up to a 30-foot radius, further increasing Big Brother’s range of sight.
“The cameras aren't even deployed by the government. It's individuals doing it for their own purpose, but you've got the aggregation of the data that changes the nature of surveillance that can be accomplished,” Neuman noted.
Will Ring and its competitors, including Nest, Blink, and Arlo be reeled in any time soon, or will these tens of millions of cameras scattered across the country eventually form an unavoidable mesh network of lateral surveillance that continues to foster racism and over-policing? Experts said that depends on how quickly lawmakers regulate the business. But as the first video security firms figured out ages ago, as long as people remain in fear of crime, Rings will continue to sell.
“Simply put, fear sells,” Guariglia quipped. “The more you are paranoid and afraid, the more cameras you're going to buy, the more apps you're going to download, [and] the more you're going to surround yourself with things that are going to make you even more afraid.”
Editor's note: This story was updated Friday, July 15 to reflect comments from Ring.
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Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Feds Investigate Tesla Crash that Killed Retired California Couple
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has begun an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Lompoc, CA retirees Mary Lou Seelandt, 66, and her husband, Karl Seelandt, 67. The couple died July 6 at a Florida rest stop after their 2015 Tesla plowed into the rear of a parked semi.
Based on the Florida Highway Patrol’s report on the crash, the couple was driving south around 2 p.m. on Interstate 75 when they exited at a rest stop. The exit lane forked, with cars directed one way and trucks the other. The Seelandt’s Tesla swerved in the wrong direction, toward the trucks — where it rammed into a parked trailer. The couple was killed at the scene.
Investigators told local media they weren’t certain that the Tesla’s autopilot was engaged when the vehicle struck the semi, but on July 13 the Orlando Sentinel reported that the Seelandt family had retained the services of Morgan & Morgan, which touts itself as “America’s largest injury law firm.” The firm also has a page dedicated entirely to Tesla Self-Driving Car Accidents, which says in part that “self-driving Teslas have been involved in several deadly accidents over the past few years, raising questions about Autopilot’s safety, Tesla’s marketing language, and the discrepancy between the two.”
Attorneys Mike Morgan and Josh Moore told the Sentinel that they are “in the very early stages of our investigation to determine what caused this deadly collision and have requested Tesla preserve all evidence related to this matter.”
In June this year, the NHTSA published a report on its “Standing General Order on Crash Reporting for Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.” This order, issued in June 2021, required “identified manufacturers and operators … to report to the agency certain crashes involving vehicles equipped with SAE Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS).”
According to the NHTSA, 367 crashes occurred between July 2021 and May this year in vehicles equipped with some form of autopilot software. During that period, California had more than any other state — 125. The top carmakers on this unfortunate list were Tesla, with 273 crashes, then Honda and Subaru, respectively. Fortunately, most injuries from these crashes were minor, though there were five recorded serious injuries and six recorded deaths.
California-based EV maker Lucid Motors only listed one autopilot-related accident, and Irvine’s Rivian wasn’t on the list at all.
The United States averages around 6 million car crashes a year, so 367 possibly autopilot-related wrecks seem vanishingly small by comparison. But as companies continue testing self-driving vehicles on California roads, precision and predictability seem more important than ever. dot.la has reached out to the NHTSA for further comment on the agency's investigations and will update once we receive a response.- Rivian, Fisker and Karma Rake in Funds - dot.LA ›
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