In America, consensus is emerging that a massive increase in testing capacity will be needed to get out of lockdown safely. How will this be done?
-2. Point-of-care machines can process throat swabs in around 15-30 minutes. Ramping up production of them would be useful in bringing testing capacity to, say, rural areas where collecting and returning throat swabs to a big central laboratory might take too long. The supply chains for electronics and reagents for these machines, however, rely heavily on China, and so building more of them now might not be easy.
Other testing methods are possible, but as yet unproven. Scientists at Rutgers University in New Jersey recently demonstrated a way to look for signs of the virus in spit samples instead of throat swabs . On April 13th America’s Food and Drug Administration granted spit tests an emergency-use authorisation. Generic spit kits that can be tweaked to do this are already widely available and can be transported to processing laboratories at ambient temperatures.
Swabbing the noses or throats—or even collecting the spittle—of millions of people a day would also require a huge number of new hires. For now, teams from America’s National Guard have been helping with that in outbreak hotspots, such as some prisons, and at drive-through testing sites.
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