PoliticoWhy the US still has not solved its coronavirus testing crisis

This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by David Lim and Alice Miranda Ollstein on politico.com on July 5, 2020.

The United States still does not have a handle on testing six months into the coronavirus pandemic.

The nation has conducted more than 4 million tests in the past week, more than ever before. But big jumps in testing capacity have been effectively erased by record-breaking increases in new infections as states reopen their economies. The supply chain problems that hampered testing early on never entirely went away and still threaten the ability of labs to conduct testing for everyone asking.

The renewed testing crisis threatens federal and state officials’ ability to quell an outbreak that public health experts say could spin out of control in the coming months.

Here are five reasons the US still does not have enough testing to safely reopen:

The supply chain is still a problem

Commercial labs across the country are still having trouble getting adequate stocks of reagents, the chemicals they use to prepare samples for testing. Disposable pipette tips, which labs use to transfer samples from transport containers into testing machines, are emerging as another issue, said Julie Khani, president of the American Clinical Laboratory Association.

“There are labs that are going to be faced with stopping collecting of samples altogether, or limiting samples to high-risk populations for example,” Khani said. “These are the really difficult challenges that are facing laboratories. We’re doing everything we can do to avoid that.”