Coronavirus testing in US could face ‘huge’ disruption due to looming shortage of critical lab materials

The slow pace of coronavirus testing could create a major gap in the US public health response, health experts say

Latest problem involves an inability to prepare samples for testing, due to a scarcity of supplies used to extract genetic material from patients

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The US is facing a looming shortage of supplies used to extract genetic material from any virus in a patient’s sample. Photo: Reuters

Published: 11:50am, 12 Mar 2020Updated: 11:04pm, 12 Mar 2020

A looming shortage in lab materials is threatening to delay coronavirus test results and cause officials to undercount the number of Americans with the virus.

The slow pace of coronavirus testing has created a major gap in the US public health response. The latest problem involves an inability to prepare samples for testing, creating uncertainties in how long it will take to get results.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said on Tuesday that he was not confident that US labs have an adequate stock of the supplies used to extract genetic material from any virus in a patient’s sample – a critical step in coronavirus testing.

“The availability of those reagents is obviously being looked at,” he said, referring to the chemicals used for preparing samples. “I’m confident of the actual test that we have, but as people begin to operationalise the test, they realise there’s other things they need to do the test.”

The coronavirus task force convened by the White House is also aware of the shortages, and one official said members are working on it.

The growing scarcity of these “RNA extraction” kits is the latest trouble for US labs, which have struggled to implement widespread coronavirus testing in the seven weeks since the country diagnosed its first case. Epidemiologists and public health officials say that the delayed roll-out, caused in part by a botched CDC test, has masked the scope of the outbreak in the United States and hobbled efforts to limit it.

If enough processing kits are not available, the risk that testing will be disrupted is “huge,” said Michael Mina, associate medical director of molecular diagnostics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“RNA extraction is the first step in being able to perform” a coronavirus test, he said. “If we cannot perform this step, the [coronavirus] test cannot be performed.”