SAN ANTONIO — Santikos Entertainment announced an innovative way to suppress the spread of the coronavirus while at the same time protecting their employees.
Santikos CEO Tim Handren announced at a press conference on Wednesday that the movie theater chain will now start testing all of their employees for coronavirus.
“We will have one of the healthiest workforces on the planet,” said Handren.
The weekly testing will be free of charge to employees.
“We are doing something for our employees that I think is really meaningful,” said Handren. “We care about them. We want them to have the safest work environment they can possibly have.”
Santikos is partnering with Community Labs LLC, a non-profit, that will provide the PCR COVID tests. Results will be provided in 24 hours.
“This is the gold standard. It's more sensitive and more accurate,” said Dr. Rachel Beddard, Chief Medical Officer of BioBridge Global, the non-profit organization that houses and staffs Community Labs.
Community Labs recently partnered with Somerset ISD to test students. The non-profit said their mission is to suppress the spread of the virus using a “micro-community” testing strategy and create “COVID-19 safety zones in San Antonio.”
Beddard said testing the employees is a fail-safe way to identify asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
“Most of the statistics say that about 50 percent of the cases that are spread come from asymptomatic people that spread it to others. And, so these are people that have no idea that they have the disease and that they're carrying the virus and that they could spread it to anybody, so they may not take any extra precautions,” said Beddard.
The move to test employees is also a safety measure to invite patrons back into the theaters.
“I want our guests to know when they come into Santikos, we take our safety protocols around this pandemic very, very seriously,” said Handren. “We want them to know that we have the safest theater in the world and we are looking out for their best interests, starting with our employees.”
Handren said Santikos has been a forerunner in movie theater safety protocols since they were able to reopen theaters on March 2.
He said at the Santikos Palladium location, they have a cold-plasma filtering on the air conditioning system.
“It kills all viruses,” said Handren. “When you come to this theater, this is literally the safest theater in the country because the air circulation, it's replaced every 20 minutes and it goes through a processing that kills everything.”
But, Handren said business has been slow but steadily improving.
“This past weekend was our third best weekend ever since we've been opened,” said Handren. “We're probably less than 10 percent of our normal attendance right now.”
Handren said studies show that there have been no known outbreaks of the virus at movie theaters, and Santikos has gone the extra mile to protect moviegoers and their employees.
“We're doing everything we can to stay open for all the right reasons and do it as responsibly as we can,” said Handren.
Santikos will begin testing all employees at all locations next week.