[Reporter: Ioanna Roumeliotis] In Ontario's far north.
The start of a new day and a cautious return to normal.
This is New Gold's silver and gold mine in Rainy River.
COVID-19 never made it in here.
And the plan is to keep it that way.
It's not a matter of numbers.
It's a matter of zero is the bar.
[Reporter] Renault Adams is New Gold's CEO now working from his home in Oakville.
That's the baseline.
We are at zero and we want to stay there.
[Reporter] As an essential service
the mine didn't completely shut down when the pandemic hit
but it did scale back.
Now as lockdown restrictions ease and hundreds more staff start to return.
The risk of infection goes up too.
So New Gold is taking COVID screening to a whole new level
and putting workplace safety to the ultimate test.
The company is the first in Canada to test employees for COVID on site.
That's it.
With what could be an industry game changer.
Because listen.
Here's the remarkable part.
So we should have your results in about two hours or so.
And we'll give you a call either way.
For me personally I've always worked to see an outcome.
To see something useful.
So I'm driven by this and I could see that we could really help people.
Organizations and make that difference literally between life and death.
So this is the device.
[Reporter] Mario Thomas is the CEO of Precision Biomonitoring in Guelph.
He says as a scientist he felt a moral obligation to create this.
As you see there's no power cord.
It runs on the battery.
[Reporter] A mobile rapid COVID test designed to flag positive cases and isolate them
in as close to real time as it gets.
We call it a virus free zone.
So with the right protocols in place people can be screened on a regular basis
to ensure that even asymptomatic people who feel good
then they can go to work
they don't, they aren't vectors.
So with a proper screening program we can catch this
and ensure that the site remains virus free.
[Reporter] So this the test is essentially a miniature mobile lab that can analyze nine samples at a time.
For this afternoon we're going to be going through the steps.
[Reporter] On the other end of this call, the health care workers back in Rainy River.
That can be done simultaneously for all the samples you're going to do in your run.
[Reporter] Amanda Naum is the co-founder of Precision Biomonitoring.
She's training them on what to do with the swabs they've collected.
Including how to actually take your sample from a swab
and then take that through, adding to our reagents.
Doing the RNA extraction.
Running the whole process and getting it set up
and then also importantly looking at the interpretation of the results.
[Reporter] If that all sounds very sciencey it is.
But it comes down to a key component manufactured at this plant in Kanata.
Those tiny beads are reagents or biomedical ingredients.
They're freeze-dried to keep them stable while they're transported to a place like a mine.
And here's the innovative part.
A single bead includes the COVID test and the reagents needed to diagnose a patient sample.
It's designed to target multiple parts of the virus.
And why it's guaranteed to be 98 percent accurate.
For any organization that wants to bring large groups of people back
the appeal is huge.
From mines to automakers and schools.
Hundreds of calls are pouring in.
So is the thinking that most companies would use this daily, weekly?
How often would they test people?
There's no fast answer to this.
It depends on a number of factors.
The number of people, the risk factors.
The basic answer that the baseline today is zero testing.
So that's where we're starting from.
So any testing in the workplace for the virus itself
not taking the temperature but really testing for the virus
is an improvement over the current situation.
[Reporter] As for those first swabs collected in Rainy River
the results are back fast and they're all negative.
And while this is just the start
the hope is that eventually every new crew gets tested at the beginning of a 14-day rotation.
So that's the priority number one is your people.
It's everything.
If you don't have a healthy workforce or healthy community
you can't have the best mine in the world.
It would never work, right?
When you bring something new like this you do it only for one reason.
Is what does that do?
Does that move the needle?
And because it's a lot of effort and a lot of time
and an engagement of a lot of people to do this
so you have to have a reason, a common reason to do it.
[Reporter] It's too early to tell what difference the test will make here.
There are already so many precautions
from regular disinfection of shared spaces like the cafeteria
and keeping numbers low in sleeping quarters to allow for safe distancing.
Some work is done in pairs but this is an open pit mine
and there are few close encounters.
So why take the step further then?
If you could manage the risk?
Because it takes only one person and that's really the risk here.
And it would take one person to infect multiple others.
And if we can do anything to catch that case on time and protect others
we'll do it.
[Reporter] And while the pandemic unfolds a quick test can mean one surer thing
in the move towards what's still an uncertain future.
Ioanna Roumeliotis, CBC News, Toronto.