The largest US laboratory company has warned that it will be impossible to increase coronavirus testing capacity to cope with demand during the fall flu season, in a sign that crippling delays will continue to hamper the response from USA To the pandemic.
James Davis, executive vice president of general diagnostics for Quest Diagnostics, said “other solutions need to be found” to screen for positive patients in addition to the nasal swab tests currently in use.
The comments come as testing companies, including Quest and its main rival LabCorp, are already struggling to keep up with demand. With 5.5 million tests being conducted weekly due to an increase in cases, both companies report delays of about a week in getting results for people.
Such a long delay makes the tests virtually useless, according to public health experts, because by the time a person receives their result, they are likely to have passed the point at which they are most infectious.
Public health experts say the United States needs to double its testing capacity to cope with rising demand after rising infections in states that reopened too quickly, including California, Texas, Florida and Arizona.
“There is no way that PCR capacity will double in the next three months,” Davis said in an interview with the Financial Times, referring to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology used in existing nasal swabs.
Demand is likely to increase in the fall and winter, when millions of Americans with common colds and flu are expected to line up for tests to eliminate the possibility of having the virus.
Dr. Jonathan Quick, head of pandemic response at the Rockefeller Foundation, said: “You have 50 to 100 million Americans a year who get colds, and given the impact of Covid on the flu, you’ll want to distinguish between the two. That is going to be a big challenge. ”
Davis said his company could expand rapidly were it not for a shortage of chemical reagents and machines from test equipment manufacturers such as Roche, ThermoFisher and Hologic, which are struggling to keep up with an increase in global demand.
He added: “We will double our capacity tomorrow. . . but it is not the laboratories that are the bottleneck. [It] it is our ability to obtain physical machines and, more importantly, our ability to feed those machines with chemical reagents. ”
Long delays in obtaining results mean that the number of cases across the country, which hit a record high of nearly 464,000 last week, is outdated and that US officials must fight the pandemic with old data.
Quest is operating its labs 24 hours a day, but there are “more specimens arriving every day than our capacity can handle,” Davis said.
Increased demand in the southern and western states has been exacerbated by attempts to expand access to testing in places that have successfully domesticated the virus, but which see mass surveillance as an essential tool to prevent the virus from re-emerging . In New York, everyone is eligible for the test, regardless of whether they have symptoms.
Davis cautioned that tests may need to be rationed to ensure that people with the most urgent need receive their results more quickly.
“Right now with demand greater than supply, we should focus on people who are symptomatic, then on people who are asymptomatic but have been in contact with a known positive,” he said.
“When this pandemic first started in March, and the rest of the country was not yet infected, we were able to export specimens outside of the New York-New Jersey area to other labs, so the change was very good. But now, in good conscience, we can’t send samples from New York and New Jersey to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Kansas, and California, due to the positivity rate. Demand in those regions has tripled. “
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Davis said Quest, which charges $ 100 per test, “was not without a moral or economic imperative to do more testing,” suggesting that additional government funding to expand PCR capacity will not solve the problem.
Instead, academic institutions and industry needed to find new solutions to the testing crisis. A blood test that detects a type of antibody produced in the early stages of the disease could help detect positive patients, he said.
Davis also noted pooled tests, which allow labs to test multiple samples at the same time, as a way to speed up processing times. On Saturday, the United States Food and Drug Administration said it would allow Quest to conduct pooled tests.
