One of the United States’s largest clinical laboratories said its testing capacity for the coronavirus is outpacing demand.
Governors and local leaders are beginning to build plans to reopen state economies and have said testing for the coronavirus is crucial before people can get back to work. Quest Diagnostics provided an updated Monday, stating it has tested more than 940,000 people thus far and predicting it will be able to test 350,000 people per week.
“We are now able to perform up to 50,000 diagnostic COVID-19 tests per day or approximately 350,000 tests per week. Our test capacity outpaces demand and we have not experienced a test backlog for about a week,” the company said in a statement.
UPDATE: @QuestDX now says it can test up to 50k people a day nationwide for #COVID19 & “test capacity outpaces demand & we have not experienced a test backlog for about a week.” @WGRZ
— Kelly Dudzik (@kellydudzikWGRZ) April 20, 2020
New York, the American coronavirus epicenter, is rolling out an “aggressive” plan to conduct antibody tests on residents.
“Any plan to start to reopen the economy has to be based on data and testing, and we have to make sure our antibody and diagnostic testing is up to the scale we need so we can safely get people back to work,” Cuomo said this week, adding that the testing would be done “in the most aggressive way in the nation.”
Vice President Mike Pence has also claimed “there is a sufficient capacity of testing across the country today for any state in America” in order to begin the first phase of reopening state economies. Some governors, however, have called the notion far-fetched.
Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said Sunday that the claim was “delusional,” while Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called it “absolutely false.”
Quest Diagnostics added, “ We have sufficient supplies on hand to conduct testing at our target capacity of 50,000 COVID-19 diagnostic tests a day. Since we began to provide COVID-19 diagnostic testing in early March, we have shipped 1.1 million specimen collection kits to healthcare providers, with more than 200,000 distributed last week alone.”
