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Now tracking the new emerging South Africa Omicron Variant

Test Kits

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Tabitha111 View Drop Down
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Joined: January 11 2020
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    Posted: March 08 2020 at 2:23pm

https://www.propublica.org/article/i-lived-through-sars-and-reported-on-ebola-these-are-the-questions-we-should-be-asking-about-coronavirus


<snip>
Lifting restrictions on testing criteria is a much-needed step, but if your takeaway was that hundreds of thousands of Americans will be able to walk into doctors’ offices by Friday and immediately get tested, you’d be wrong. 


It doesn’t matter if boxes upon boxes of kits are available if labs are struggling to set up the tests or are short on staff to run them. At the end of the day, what I want to know (and I imagine, what everyone wants to know) is how many people can be tested. That’s the unit that I am pressing public health officials and lab directors for when I interview them.

Here are some basics that may be useful to keep in mind: The CDC test kits can be thought of somewhat like a Blue Apron meal kit; there’s some assembly required before a lab can begin testing. It’s not like a protein bar, ready to eat straight out of the wrapper.

As of Wednesday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents public health labs across the United States, told me that each CDC test kit can run about 700 specimens. Note the “about” — you might have heard that each CDC test kit can run 1,000 specimens. That’s also true, but labs use up a certain amount of material in the process of setting up the kit and also to ensure that all the results from actual patient samples are accurate. So that’s where the “about 700” number is coming from.

None of those numbers, so far, are in units of what I care about — patients. We’re still talking about samples and specimens. APHL says the labs are running two specimens per patient, to double-check the result. So that means you actually can only test 350 people per kit.

... More at the link


'A man who does not think and plan long ahead will find trouble right at his door.'
--Confucius

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