(Reuters) - The United States might have more COVID-19 testing capacity than any other country. So why have we seen laboratories overwhelmed and many patients again waiting a week or more for results?
At the heart of the crisis is a reliance by public and private labs on automated testing equipment that locks them in to using proprietary chemical kits and other tools made by a handful of manufacturers.
The result: as infection rates spike nationwide, many labs aren’t running anywhere near capacity because of supply-chain bottlenecks, according to Reuters interviews with 16 hospital, state, commercial and academic labs and an analysis of state and city procurement plans.
A few companies – Cepheid, Hologic Inc, Roche and Abbott Laboratories – dominate this market. Their machines run on chemical kits and disposable plastic parts like sample plates and pipettes that only they sell, much like branded printer cartridges.
“The vendors are in an impossible situation right now where they can’t say yes to everyone,” said Geoffrey Baird, who runs the medical laboratory at the University of Washington.
U.S. labs now run about 800,000 diagnostic tests daily, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But the United States needs 6-10 million tests per day, by various estimates.
Congress has earmarked $11 billion to support this drive, and in May, states filed plans with the government describing the equipment and supplies they would buy.
But taken together, the plans show that public health officials are not addressing the core supply-chain problem, according to the Reuters analysis....
