CA is really having trouble getting swabs, sample transport media and RNA extraction kits for the diagnostic tests. Testing is up to nearly 100,000 per day, but that is nothing to where it needs to be according to CAs plan to relax shelter at home.
You hit the three pillars there...and this is why we are NOT yet testing over 1M/week. Thank you for the reminder.
Extraction is a big bottleneck, specifically plastics. Has been the entire time. Getting much better this month as manufacturing capacity has jumped across the board at every major company, but it’s truly mind-boggling from an order volume standpoint.
However, even the testing labs that have now been able to get enough extraction and have capacity are limited by samples coming to them. Why?
Swabs and viral transport media.
Approximately five weeks ago, i was peripherally in a conversation about those very items with people at a respected academic hospital who were scrambling then for any alternatives or creative options to secure a supply chain.
I heard a few weeks back that nylon swabs were such a low margin item that were still only manufactured by a few companies. Most of those were in China. One of the prominent suppliers to the US was a company in Italy. Yeah...boom and boom.
Without viral transport media in a container/tube to put the swab in and ship...no amount of testing capacity matters.
Here’s how to make VTM at home. It’s mostly Fetal Bovine Serum with some salts and antibiotic/antifungal. The FBS is why it’s in short supply, I’d guess.
I don’t know much about VTM and who all sells/manufactures it, and I must confess I thought it was more complex.
I’m fairly shocked they don’t use something that both inactivates the virus as well as stabilizes the RNA in the sample so it does not degrade. This is essentially a growth media and you have to test in 48 hours. I’m assuming you have potentially live virus on the receiving end, which would make the biohazard shipping and sample intake more complex.