A couple days ago, our Dear Leader waved around a list of what turned out to be lab test machines capable of running Covid-19 tests, claiming that there were ‘lots of locations’ and other blather.
I wrote a diary titled ‘Here’s the massive new testing capability touted tonight by the White House’, in which I analyzed one map shown at the briefing (Maryland) of test machine locations and found some information about the specific machines to get a better idea of how many tests could be run. It wasn’t very scientific, and even with the help of other kossaks we couldn’t get a very good number of possible tests that could be run, but the general indication was: not enough to support good containment measures which are essential to ‘opening up the country’.
In his daily briefing today, (at the 11 minute mark) New York governor Andrew Cuomo revealed that his folks had done the full analysis of the machines located in his state. He stated that if all the 300 labs in NY ran their machines 24/7, without any limitations (materials, reagents, breakdowns, staffing issues, etc.) they would be able to complete about 40,000 tests per day, up from about 20,000 now.
OK, sounds like a lot, but is it? That’s about .002 tests per person in NY (40,000 tests / 20,000,000 population) per day.
I don’t have any reason to believe that NY has less per capita testing capacity than other states (if anything it probably has more), so extrapolating the .002 rate nationwide gives us a hard ceiling of 660,000 tests per day (again with everything running perfectly 24/7).
That’s not enough — I’ve seen estimates ranging from 2 million to 20 million tests per day required nationwide to get to anything even remotely approaching ‘normal daily life’.
There are a number of other factors that will keep the actual number of daily tests completed far below the optimum number, including:
- these are not ‘Covid-19’ testing machines — they are nearly all in use every day in labs and hospitals across the nation, so Covid-19 tests will compete for space in the machines
- very few machines are in use 24/7, mostly those at large, busy hospitals, where they are already being heavily used
- reagents and other test materials are a major issue
- these are complex machines, especially the larger ones, and require regular downtime for maintenance
- there are a limited number of people qualified to use these machines
There are other factors, I’m sure, but I think you get the point.
With all of those restrictions, it’s hard to imagine that the upper limit of tests would be much above half, or 330,000 tests per day. That’s even worse.
Well, you say, just have Dear Leader invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Stouffer Foods and Harley Davidson to make PCR test machines. That will solve everything!
Wait, why did I suggest two companies that have never built anything like PCR test machines??? Well, that’s what he did with ventilators by forcing Ford and GM to build them, so why change that phenomenally successful process?
Yes, of course, the companies that make these test machines could be convinced to gear up their production. It’s pretty simple: just have the federal government commit to buying x number of machines at y cost and they will get busy very quickly. But have you seen any of the new ventilators yet? No, it takes a long time to build them, lots of the parts come from China or somewhere else that is shut down because of the pandemic, and it takes time to bootstrap a manufacturing process like this.
(My best example of this is to look at how FDR and George Marshall, knowing that the USA was going to get dragged into WWII in both Europe and the Pacific, started building the industrial capacity we needed several years before…. it’s a fascinating story).
So that’s where we’re at on testing, 2 days before Georgia leads the desperate red state rush to kill us all.
And as if that wasn’t enough bad news on testing, Abbott — the manufacturer of the little ID Now single sample test machine that Dear Leader was gleefully fondling in the Rose Garden a few weeks ago — admitted today that it’s Covid-19 PCR test is giving up to 15% false negatives…. yeah, false NEGATIVES!.
OK, that’s all the bad news I can handle for one diary. I really enjoy the great discussions that blossom in the comments — I learn more there than from just about anywhere else.
Last item: check out this visualization of epidemic spread. I can’t stop watching it again and again.
Cheers.