Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest providers of diagnostic tests in the country, said late Monday that it has reduced its coronavirus testing turnaround time to one to two days for all patients, down from more than seven days a month ago.
The company and other labs are struggling to keep up with demand for Covid-19 testing, as the virus spread rapidly across large swaths of U.S. public health specialists, criticizing the delay in testing covers, for ‘ t it means that people did not know whether they were isolating the virus and needed to cut the chain of transmission.
Last month, the Food and Drug Administration authorized a new laboratory technique for Quest that the company said would help cut testing time.
“We have completed testing and reporting performance of excellent test specimens associated with the previous, recent surge,” the company said in a statement Monday night. “We now have enough capacity to meet incoming orders.”
The company now has the capacity to perform 150,000 diagnostic tests per day, it said, adding that it “expects to scale our capacity to 185,000 tests per day by Labor Day with further gains possible after that.”
“Interest rates can fluctuate with demand and vary by region,” the company added. “COVID-19 is unpredictable, and dynamic changes that affect demand, supply and other factors can slow down turnaround times.”
The rapid turnaround time, if it holds up, could help the U.S. identify more people with Covid-19 who have no symptoms and may have unknowingly spread the virus. It could also provide such people with the information they need to isolate themselves before the virus is passed on to many others.
Also helping to boost the U.S. testing program is Yale University’s new search-based coronavirus test. Yale described the test in a press release as “simpler, cheaper and less invasive” than the common method of coronavirus testing involving a nasal swab. It is also cross-validated on most popular test platforms, meaning it can be rolled out quickly across the country.
A limited supply of the exact types of Covid-19 tests has hampered the U.S. response to the coronavirus since the recent hurricane, say public health specialists. Quest and other large laboratory operators have largely remained responsible for enhancing the country’s ability to perform molecular diagnostic tests, which are the most accurate tests on the market but require a specific institution, trained personnel and crisp deliveries to process.
Testing across the country fell substantially last week, making it difficult for epidemiologists to determine if and where the virus is spreading. Testing in the US has since recovered, but remains below previous levels, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer project set up by journalists at The Atlantic magazine.
“I have really come to believe that we have entered a real, new, emerging crisis with testing and it makes it difficult to know where the pandemic is slowing down and where it is not,” Drs. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said in an interview with CNBC last week.
Amid the lack of molecular testing, some public health specialists, including Jha, have called for a massive rollout of less accurate but more accessible tests to screen for the virus. However, the Trump administration has said several times that the national testing program is working as intended.
“We are doing the right amount of testing now to reduce the spread, flatten the curve, save lives,” said adm. Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health and testing for the Trump administration’s czar, said in a conference call with reporters Thursday. “You don’t beat the virus by hunting everyone every time.”
Jha and others, however, have repeatedly criticized the administration’s plan for testing as too bad, especially and reopening schools and businesses. Jha said last week that as more students and staff re-enter society and the economy, more testing would detect health officials and individuals new clusters of infection.
“How pathetic are we as a nation to be in this pandemic for six months, can we not get this game right? We do not have enough tests. Tests last two weeks,” Jha said. “We can’t figure out where the outbreaks are getting better or worse because our numbers are so plagued that we have to spit on the data.”
– CNBC’s Kevin Stankiewicz contributed to this report.
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