Private companies could once again trigger a coronavirus test crisis, the report suggests

Now that private company coronavirus tests are coming online, the Trump administration promised that the shortage of test kits would soon disappear.

That may be the case, as more than 100,000 Americans are now being tested daily in the US.

But just because more people are ‘tested’ – their noses cleaned before collecting samples – doesn’t mean more people discover their results.

According to an investigation by The Atlantic Ocean, companies such as Quest Diagnostics that seized the opportunity to make and drive out hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 are now facing their own backlogs.

And Americans who wait up to a week for results suffer the consequences, while companies generate revenue from the sale of diagnostic kits.

By Wednesday April 1, more than a million Americans had been tested for coronavirus, according to data tracking site 1point3 acres.

However, there may be a difference between the collected test samples and the returned test results.

Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest such companies in the US, put the tests online March 9.

On March 23, it tested in 12 labs in 12 labs across the country and was expected to handle 30,000 tests per day.

Regardless of the number of tests the company distributes, however, throughput is limited by the number of labs managing its platform.

“Although we are rapidly expanding testing capacity, demand for testing is growing faster and we cannot accommodate everyone who wants to test and has tight turnaround times,” Quest said in a statement.

“To address this issue, we are working with healthcare systems to prioritize testing for hospital patients and symptomatic hospital staff.

“Hospitals and healthcare systems can submit samples of these patients to us labeled” high priority. ” As a result, these specimens will be accelerated within our standard first in, first out test process. Health systems are already reporting ways to submit samples under these conditions. ‘

But the Atlantic report suggests the delays go beyond prioritizing tests for certain patients.

Dr. Dina Greene, head of a regional Kaiser Permanente laboratory in Washington state, told the Atlantic Ocean that Quest had approached her laboratory and tried out its tests.

The company promised that they could reverse the test results within 24 to 48 hours.

But the experience of Dr. Greene suggests that they greatly overestimate their own capacity.

“We quickly realized that it was not allowed and we had to stay with UW”, where she is an associate professor and where her lab had previously sent their test kits for analysis.

And the longer patients have to wait – even and especially the prioritized hospitalized – the more likely they are to unconsciously expose others, including caregivers.

Even Senator Rand Paul waited six days for his test results (although it’s not clear if they were run by a private or public lab) and was criticized for exposing others before being diagnosed with coronavirus.

President Trump has repeatedly praised the private sector as heroes of the test crisis, but their own bottlenecks may cause a second, as people rush to get these tests and find that their hospitals haven’t had time to set them up, or the laboratories intended to perform these tests are overloaded or not equipped for this.

Quest says that will change in the near future.

“There was a huge demand because we only had one laboratory [in San Juan Capistrano] for about a week or more, and all demand was directed to that lab, “Wendy Bost, a company spokesperson, told The Atlantic.

Now the company would perform tests in 12 laboratories.

“The average lead time nationally is four to five days, from the time we collect the sample to the time we report the results,” said Bost.

“However, there have been cases that have been several days longer.”

The concern now is that Quest – and possibly other labs – will not reveal their backlog of samples waiting to be tested.

“It could be that Quest has mountains and mountains of monsters they can’t reach,” a clinical laboratory director anonymously told The Atlantic.

“If so, they should tell someone.”