Reply to Testing for COVID-19 in US: “Tests are being rationed”, and outlook for the future

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can we order them ourselves from the W.H.O.?

Can our states order the test kits?

[/quote]

You need kits and also [b]PCR machines.[/b]

And you can’t just “order” 100,000 “W Coronavirus Test Kits”.

This is the kind of thing that takes weeks or months to plan for.[/quote]

This is one of the major hiccups in the whole chain.  
American labs need to be certified to be able to process human lab results (to guarantee that they all process tests the same way and get the same results)  There are only so many labs in America that have this certification (Quest and Labcorps being two major ones).  Quest and Lapcorps only have so many PCR machines which are needed to process the Corona tests.  These two companies combined can process something like 5000 kits a day with their available PCR machines.  Total.

Now many university and medical school labs also have these PCR machines that their bench scientists (i.e. laboratory) scientists use in their research.  Some of the these universities (UCSF, U of Wash, Hopkins) are using these machines to independently process kits.   However, the results aren't certified (but it doesn't seem to matter as far as reporting is going). 
However, harnessing this capacity isn't an easy thing to do either.  You have to train people, etc. and the machines are in random rooms all over schools of medicine.

Basically, it's a major problem.  I'm not sure why other countries have the technology more readily available but we clearly don't.  [/quote]

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