Summer camp kids are America’s coronavirus test subjects

Katherine Rosman

Even before Howard Salzberg announced his intention to open the gates of Camp Modin in Belgrade, Maine, for the summer — defying a drumbeat for cancellation during the coronavirus pandemic — he was getting pitched. And pitched and pitched and pitched.

By the companies selling masks, face shields, gloves and massive tents like you’d see at an outdoor wedding. By the companies pushing plans for chartered planes and buses to transport campers from Miami, Boston and New York. By the state-of-the-art-thermometer guys. By the hand-sanitizer station people.

But mostly there are entrepreneurs selling services to test for the virus. “This has been the Wild West of testing,” Salzberg said. “Everyone wants to do testing.”

Summer camp is one of the first industries with an urgent deadline to figure out a way to bring back a large number of people to one place. It’s something of a laboratory for companies, some hastily formed, trying out the consumer testing market. Schools, universities, corporate offices and entertainment venues are being pitched now as well. They’ll be watching to see how opening works out for summer camps.

In states where government health officials are permitting sleep away camps to operate, the camps are striving to create quarantine like conditions under which children and most staff members remain on the grounds throughout the summer.

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There are still plenty of uncertainties. This is where testing services come in. They are being marketed by companies like Rapid Reliable Testing, which was created in April.

“This is a hot, hot topic,” said Ari Matityahu, 30, one of two men handling the company’s camp outreach, during a webinar last month that more than 25 camp directors Zoomed into.

The other man, Joe Hoenig, 56, who told webinar attendees that he is a former camp director and current camp owner, was hired as a consultant by Rapid Reliable Testing to help make connections to camp directors.

Hoenig emailed many in the field. “I know these are tough times for camps and tough decisions that will need to be made. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! We all need to be prepared if and when we have the green light to open Camp this summer. We are a large Health Care company that is doing COVID-19 testing for large corporations and organizations,” he wrote. (A spokesman for Rapid Reliable Testing said he could not provide names of those “large corporations and organizations.”)

Rapid Reliable Testing is a subsidiary of the company that owns Ambulnz, a private fleet of vehicles driven and operated by health care providers for nonemergency transport, often taking patients back to nursing home and rehabs after medical procedures.

“Think of us like the Uber for ambulance,” said Matityahu, vice president for strategy and special projects for both companies.

During the peak of the coronavirus crisis in New York in March and April, Ambulnz was subcontracted through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response efforts for nonemergency transport of patients, some of whom had COVID-19. The company created a protocol for testing its employees.

But the rest of Ambulnz’s business was hurt by stay-at-home orders that diminished procedures that weren’t urgently needed.

Faced with the prospect of laying off part of its workforce, and after being asked by a nursing home to help test its employees, Ambulnz executives decided to start another company that would meet anticipated demand for consumer testing and also give opportunity to idling EMTs and other health care workers, said Anthony Capone, chief technology officer for Ambulnz and Rapid Reliable Testing.

To conduct the tests, Capone, 32, collaborated with Mako Medical, a 6-year-old laboratory company in North Carolina that processes medical tests including routine blood work and genomics testing. Since March, Mako Medical has processed more than 100,000 coronavirus tests, said the company’s chief operating officer, Josh Arant, 31.

Matityahu (hired by Ambulnz in January by Stan Vashovsky, 47, the company founder) had the idea to aim first for the summer camp market. “I have a passion for camp,” said Matityahu in an interview.

He also exuded excitement for camp to the participants of the webinar, telling them, “I’ve been a camp director for the last 9 years.”

(A representative of Camp Moshava in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, said that Matityahu had been a camper, counselor and an aquatics director. Matityahu also led large groups of teenagers on summer travel tours to Israel for several summers. Most recently, he worked for WeWork, overseeing special projects in the office of its now disgraced former CEO, Adam Neumann.)

During the webinar, Matityahu reminded the camp directors of their problem — “Never, ever do any of us on this call want to be known as ‘the COVID Camp,’” he said — and offered a solution.

Investing in test services sold by Rapid Reliable, which he said would cost $137.50 per test, will help achieve the goal of “mitigating the risk of COVID-19, the spread of it,” he said. The test results, he said, would take no longer than 48 hours.

He said that optimally camps would retest each camper upon arrival and several times more through the summer: six times for a seven-week session and four times for a five-week session.

“We’re here to provide services with our lab partners like Mako Labs that will offer a turnkey solution to help you test not just your campers but your entire staff, front end and back end of camp,” Matityahu said.

Last week, Rapid Reliable sent an email to prospective camp clients saying it would drop its price to about $90 per test.

Vault Health is another company marketing test services to camp directors. Before concentrating on coronavirus testing for summer campers, Vault Health provided men who were reluctant to see a doctor care for sexual and cardiovascular health through a telemedicine app.

“We’re the guy-necologist,” said Jason Feldman, 48, one of the company’s founders. “Women have good access to health care that men don’t have.”

In his work for Vault, Feldman has developed a relationship with RUCDR Infinite Biologics, a lab services business run out of Rutgers University that has developed an at-home collection kit.

Feldman realized that the Rutgers lab might help him help camps to open, so he shifted his focus from men’s health. “It was serendipity,” said Feldman, who previously worked for The Body Shop and until last year was head of the Prime Video Direct division at Amazon.

Here is his pitch to camps: They provide their campers’ parents with a link to the Vault platform, and parents sign up and request a coronavirus test. A kit will then arrive by UPS overnight. It’s a plastic tube you spit into, much like the consumer DNA test kits familiar from popular genealogy websites.

Parents enter into a Vault Zoom room and connect with a health care provider who will watch the child spit into the tube, verifying that the child is providing the sample. The online health professional also makes sure the child provides enough spit and properly reseals the tube. The sample gets dropped into a UPS overnight box and lands at the Rutgers lab in New Jersey. Results come back within 48 hours.

“Right now we don’t have any data that should suggest that the test should perform any worse in children,” said Dr. Alex Pastuszak, 41, a urologist who is Vault’s chief clinical officer.

Each test costs about $150.

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