![]() And members of the American Clinical Laboratory Association, a group that represents many of the country’s private labs, have lamented the spotty availability of materials like chemicals and pipette tips, Julie Khani, the organization’s president, said in an email. In a statement released on July 20, Quest noted that the dearth of equipment and chemicals comprised “the most significant gating factor” in its testing pipeline. “We’re here for the initial emergency response, then the clinical lab system of the country typically takes on the lion’s share of testing.”Īs demand ratchets up, it’s these commercial labs that have been left in a lurch. Many of these facilities have been somewhat buffered from shortages by their access to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s International Reagent Resource, which maintains stocks of supplies necessary to run the agency’s in-house coronavirus tests.īut most state public health labs are not set up to perform diagnostics en masse, Dr. Some are run in public health laboratories operated by governments at the federal, state or local level. Rohlfing said, “we do not actually know how the opening up is going here.”Īfter a person’s specimen is collected at a hospital, clinic or community testing site, it can go on to be processed in a dizzying bevy of places. If he gets a negative result, it won’t help much, since he could have been exposed in the interim. That’s far longer than the four days he waited the last time he was tested at the same site, in early June. Wait times for test results from both companies have ballooned to several days - in some cases stretching well over a week.ĭavid Rohlfing, who took one of Quest’s tests at a walk-in site in Queens on July 6, said he still didn’t have his results 17 days later. Soaring demand has also exacerbated capacity issues at private laboratories such as LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics, which together have performed one-third of the nation’s tests. About as many said they were unable to meet current testing needs. More than 20 percent of the 72 institutions recently surveyed by the Association of Public Health Laboratories have said they will run out of at least one item required to do their tests within a week. “Just when we think we’ve dealt with one issue, another challenge pops up.” “It’s a merry-go-round of shortages,” said Karissa Culbreath, the laboratory’s scientific director of infectious disease, research and development. N.Y.C.’s Mandate: New York City will end its aggressive but contentious vaccine mandate for municipal workers, Mayor Eric Adams announced, signaling a key moment in the city’s long battle against the pandemic.Īnd in New Mexico, researchers at TriCore Reference Laboratories - the state’s largest medical laboratory - have revved up testing in the days after deliveries arrive, only to find themselves hamstrung by faltering supplies at week’s end.But they are increasingly left to protect themselves as the rest of the country abandons precautions. Dangers Remain for Seniors: For older Americans, the Covid pandemic still poses significant threats.New Drug’s Long Odds: A promising new treatment quashes all Covid variants, but regulatory hurdles and a lack of funding make it unlikely to reach the United States market anytime soon.In Mississippi, the pandemic showed the pitfalls of that approach. Leaving Millions on the Table: Stop-and-go federal funding floods public health agencies with cash during crises but starves them of funds afterward.“I feel like I lived this day four or five months ago.” “It’s like Groundhog Day,” said Scott Shone, director of the North Carolina State Laboratory of Public Health. ![]() The crisis is an eerie echo of the early days of the pandemic, when researchers scrambled to find the swabs and liquids needed to collect and store samples en route to laboratories. Dwindling stocks of machines, containers and chemicals needed to extract or amplify the coronavirus’s genetic material have clogged almost every point along the testing workflow. Pipette tips aren’t the only laboratory items in short supply. The demand has been so high, he said, that Tecan has tapped into an emergency stash, and is racing to install new production lines that he hopes will double the company’s output by fall. customers in recent months, according to Martin Brändle, the firm’s senior vice president of corporate communications and investor relations. The Swiss company Tecan, which supplies pipette tips for machines used by hundreds of laboratories in the United States, has been slammed with orders from U.S. Fed into automated devices, pipette tips can help researchers blaze through hundreds of coronavirus tests in a matter of hours, sparing them grueling manual labor.
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