US lab giant warns of new Covid testing crunch in autumn
Quest Diagnostics executive says ‘no way’ capacity will expand enough to cope with flu season
The largest laboratory company in the US has warned it will be impossible to increase coronavirus testing capacity to cope with demand during the autumn flu season, in a sign that crippling delays will continue to hamper the US response to the pandemic.
James Davis, executive vice-president of general diagnostics at Quest Diagnostics, said “other solutions need to be found” to detect 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 5.5m tests being conducted a week due to a spike in cases, both companies are reporting delays of about a week in getting results to people.
Such a long delay renders testing virtually pointless, 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 US needs to double its testing capacity to cope with a surge in demand following rising infections in states that reopened too quickly, including California, Texas, Florida and Arizona.
“There is no way that PCR capacity is going to double in the next three months,” Mr Davis said in an interview with the Financial Times, referencing polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technology used in existing nasal swabs.
Demand is likely to surge in the autumn and winter when millions of Americans with common colds and the flu are expected to line up for tests to eliminate the possibility they have the virus.
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.
The surge in demand in states in the south and west has been exacerbated by attempts to expand access to testing in places that have managed to tame the virus, but which see mass surveillance as an essential tool to prevent the virus from resurging. In New York everyone is eligible for testing regardless of whether they have symptoms.
Mr Davis warned that testing might need to be rationed to ensure that those with the most urgent need receive their results more quickly.
“Right now with demand greater than supply, we should focus on the people that are symptomatic, then on the people that 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 out of the New York-New Jersey area to other labs, so the turnaround was very good. But now we can’t in good conscience send specimens from New York and New Jersey to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Kansas and California, because of the positivity rate. Demand in those regions has increased threefold.”
The surge in demand in states in the south and west has been exacerbated by attempts to expand access to testing in places that have managed to tame the virus, but which see mass surveillance as an essential tool to prevent the virus from resurging. In New York everyone is eligible for testing regardless of whether they have symptoms.
Mr Davis warned that testing might need to be rationed to ensure that those with the most urgent need receive their results more quickly.
“Right now with demand greater than supply, we should focus on the people that are symptomatic, then on the people that 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 out of the New York-New Jersey area to other labs, so the turnaround was very good. But now we can’t in good conscience send specimens from New York and New Jersey to Florida, Texas, Arizona, Kansas and California, because of the positivity rate. Demand in those regions has increased threefold.”