FT on US shortage21 Jul 2020 15:57
https://www.ft.com/content/4c9b4ae0-0559-4fe2-8806-53c6a8e3ab3a
Dr Jonathan Quick, head of pandemic response at the Rockefeller Foundation, said: “You have 50m to 100m Americans a year getting the sniffles and, given the impact of Covid versus flu, you’re going to want to distinguish between the two. That’s going to be a huge challenge.”
Mr Davis said his company would be able to expand quickly were it not for a shortage of chemical reagents and machines from testing equipment makers such as Roche, ThermoFisher and Hologic, which are struggling to keep up with a surge in global demand.
He added: “We would double our capacity tomorrow?.?.?.?but it’s not the labs that are the bottleneck. [It] is our ability to get physical machines and, more importantly, our ability to feed those machines with chemical reagents.”
Long delays in getting results mean that the number of nationwide cases — which hit a record of almost 464,000 last week — is out-of-date, and that US officials must fight the pandemic with old data.
Quest is running its laboratories 24 hours a day but there are “more specimens coming in every day than our capacity can handle”, Mr Davis said.