(MarketWatch) – Shares of Walmart Inc. WMT, +0.91% gained 0.4% in trading on Tuesday after an executive said the retail giant is testing drone deliveries of COVID-19 test collection kits in partnership with Quest Diagnostics Inc. DGX, -2.82%.
Quest has received authorization from the Food and Drug Administration during the pandemic for five COVID-19 diagnostic tests. Its stock was down 2.7% in trading on Tuesday.
The project will test delivering COVID-19 test collection kits to single-family homes in North Las Vegas and Cheektowaga, New York, located within a mile of a Walmart supercenter next month, according to Tom Ward, Walmart’s SVP of customer product, who wrote a blog post on Tuesday. The people who receive a test kit by drone delivery perform the nasal swab at home and mail it back to Quest.
“There’s a lot we can learn from our drone delivery pilots to help determine what roles drones can play in pandemic response, health care delivery, and retail,” he wrote. So far this year Walmart’s stock is up 15.7%, shares of Quest have gained 7.8%, and the S&P 500 SPX, +0.43% is up 1.5%.
