Some labs fear a shortage of supplies for tests
Laboratories around the United States are now facing potential shortages of key materials and chemicals needed to run tests for the coronavirus as cases spread to more than twothirds of states and the global pandemic strains testing resources even further.
Some lab directors say they are already beginning to run low on the supplies needed to extract RNA from nasal swabs, a crucial initial step that is separate from the millions of test kits that the federal government has promised to ship to every state. Others say they are weighing whether to borrow some materials from other research labs that aren’t involved in creating or running coronavirus tests.
And some lab directors are worried about the future availability of the reagents, or chemical ingredients, used in the tests themselves. Several labs have also said that they have had trouble getting virus samples that are needed to validate the tests to make sure they are properly identifying positive samples.
Public health officials and health care providers have clamored to get enough tests following a botched rollout of testing kits by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and a delay by the Food and Drug Administration in allowing independent labs to develop their own test — that led to weeks of delays in detecting the spread of the virus in the country.
“The lack of testing in the United States is a debacle,” said Dr. Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health. “We’re supposed to be the best biomedical powerhouse in the world, and we’re unable to do something almost every other country is doing on an orders of magnitude bigger scale.”
Today, public health labs in every state say they are running the tests, and academic and commercial labs have been scrambling to increase their capacities to check for the virus.
But Washington, New York and California are leading states with hundreds of cases, as officials warned again on Wednesday that the numbers will continue to rise.
People are also reporting that they still can’t get tested, in some cases because doctors and hospitals are evaluating patients based on their symptoms and whether those are indicative of the virus or regular flu.
The RNA extraction kits “are usually things we wouldn’t ever even wonder if they were running out because they’re always around,” said Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But in this case, because everyone in the world is trying to extract RNA right now, they seem to be low.”
At UCLA, the chief of the microbiology section of the medical center’s clinical lab was so concerned about his supply of RNA extraction kits made by the company Qiagen that he recently sent an email to colleagues at the university’s research labs asking if they had any.
“While our investigators were eager to help, none were using the kit in their labs,” said Elaine Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the medical center.