Last Thursday, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) crash program to ramp up COVID testing capacity to 6 million tests per day by December. It hopes to get a significant part of that result before December, so as to address the expected crush of testing required by school openings and by the influenza season.
This is an important step in the right direction, but still significantly short of what is actually required. Specialists estimate that currently some 5 million tests per day are required in the U.S.; but when students start returning to school, another 28 million tests per week — or 4 million per day — will be needed. That brings the daily real need to about 9 million tests per day, including the ability to process them quickly, for example in a 48-hour window so that contact tracing can be carried out on positive test results.
Where do we stand today? Over the last month, there has been some expansion of COVID testing capacity, bringing us to 8 million per week, or a little over 1 million per day. Even this level has outpaced the ability to process the tests, which stands at about 5-8 million per week. That translates into longer and longer turnaround time before results are provided. A Medscape article explains that the turnaround time for the largest lab, Quest Diagnostics, which processes about 130,000 tests per day in their 20 labs, has gone from four days in June, to between one to two weeks in July. Quest reports that they are limited by a worldwide shortage both of chemical reagents and the proper machinery.
