The haul was significant: 100,000 COVID-19 diagnostic tests airlifted from Shanghai to Seattle. It's the unlikely story of a University of Washington pathologist who was so determined last month to stock up on COVID-19 test kits for his community that he tapped his department’s reserve funds for
The plot had the hallmarks of an international spy thriller: a desperate pathologist, a contact code-named “Strawberry,” a secret associate in China, tense waiting games, a six-figure payout, an 11th-hour international rescue mission – and then a gut-punch twist ending.
After the kits had been donated and distributed, Baird learned that some of the specimen collection kits were contaminated with a common bacteria called stenotrophomonas maltophilia that lives in soil and on plastic surfaces. "There are very high quality control standards for these kinds of supplies, which is why the [University of Washington] was able to recently detect an issue," a spokesperson for Washington state's Department of Health."We will continue to work to ensure that the supplies are clean, safe, and reliable.
While roughly 150,000 Americans a day are being tested for COVID-19, that figure has remained roughly static for two weeks, according to the COVID Tracking Project, and health officials have concluded that exponentially more Americans need to be tested daily before areas of the country can begin safely re-opening.
When ABC News contacted the firm’s export department in China on Wednesday, an employee said the factory does not manufacture any testing kits and then hung up the phone. "They've taken every measure that they should take," Nadelson said."From what I understand contamination sometimes happens, and there are ways that you go about figuring out what [happened], And they've done that. They think that they did actually find the source of it. And they'll fix it, and they've remediated all of it.""Actually, we're just waiting on that," she said.
Earlier this week, a blue-ribbon panel of experts gauged that domestic test producers would have to deliver 5 million tests a day by early June in order to safe re-open parts of the country by July. Currently, a total of more than 25 million tests are expected to have been produced by the end of April.
Last month in Albany, New York opened the first state lab in the country to begin testing for coronavirus based on its own test, developed on-site. This week, Kentucky began a public-private partnership with the grocer chain Kroger to conduct 20,000 tests in five weeks, among other initiatives. “That call set in motion 22 straight days of vetting, testing, negotiations and protocols between our scientists and doctors,” Hogan said at a press conference. Eight Maryland state government agencies, and our counterparts in Korea.”"Could've saved a lot of money, but that's okay,” the president said."I don't think he needed to go to South Korea. I think he needed to get a little knowledge. That would've been helpful.
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