Quote Originally Posted by Lord Dargavel View Post
It really isn’t that simple. My company is one of several large medical companies who have launched a COVID-19 test in record time ... months !!! And that is thanks to the FDA massively relaxing the usual protocols. We hope to be producing tests in the millions by the end of March. Staff in the US and elsewhere worldwide have been literally working around the clock and it is incredible achievement, especially given the laws surrounding drug/medical testing and production. It’s just not as simple as do lots more tests. Mass testing has to be scalable, affordable and available, and that takes time!

You will have heard Chris Witty talking about the antibody test which tests for the presence of antibodies. This will tell whether you’ve had COVID-19, not whether you have it. The test we are releasing uses PCR to replicate RNA and will take around 4 hours. The testing equipment can only do a certain number of tests per hour and you need enough laboratory staff to run and validate the tests. That is a challenge in itself. My partner is a biomedical scientist and is presently on 14 day isolation. So the labs have challenges. Get more blood testing machines you might say. Again it’s not that simple as they must be delivered, installed and validated (that is my job). Again this takes many weeks per machine.

When you have a validated machine you then require the consumables to run the tests in bulk. Another huge manufacturing task and challenge. So it’s just not as simple to say we’ve had an extra month and should be able to do so much more testing. It just doesn’t work like that for a new virus!
I can't dispute what you are saying, so I won't, but I do look at countries like China, South Korea and Germany off the top of my head who appear to have been far more effective at overcoming all of these problems.