As China’s Covid-19 test kit orders surge globally, manufacturers are hiring en masse to meet demand
- Highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are behind some of the worst outbreaks that China has seen since the onset of the pandemic, resulting in tens of millions of tests
- Manufacturers say they have hired hundreds or even thousands of workers as orders flood in for Covid-19 testing kits
China’s manufacturers of Covid-19 testing kits are racing to keep up with surging demand, both domestically and abroad, as the world grapples with a spike in cases caused by the highly infectious Omicron and Delta variants.
“We’ve hired more than 200 temp workers in the past two months to keep up with the robust amount of orders we got from Europe and Bangladesh,” said Zhang Shuwen, general manager at Nanjing-based Liming Bio, which makes and exports the testing kits.
Orders at Zhang’s company have been on the rise since the latter half of last year, just as the Delta variant started to rapidly spread throughout the world, and he said there are now more temporary workers at his company than permanent staff.
The more recent Omicron variant has only intensified demand for coronavirus testing kits.
Zhang speculated that Chinese companies may be supplying roughly half of the coronavirus test kits being used around the world.