[Goose]

I wonder if some of this is supply chain.  Just because the manufacturing capacity exceeds demand, doesn't mean that there isn't a lag time between increased demand and when the supplies reach where they need to be in time to match the spike in supply.

Especially with travel impacted, and a lot of these supplies being manufactured on the other side of the world.

BC

I think this is potentially an issue, but six months in to the outbreak, you would expect the testing supply chain pipeline to be full by now. The purchasing people also should know what the lead times are, and I would expect the lead times should be going down, not up. Independent of the cause, if I am a lab who can't test because I don't have a reagent (for whatever reason), I would be screaming to the press and the public about it. We aren't seeing that.

I think it more probable that there are administrative delays that make the process take more time than it should. There are lots of "steps" in getting a sample from the test subject to the remote lab and back, and each one of those steps probably isn't optimized for speed. Nobody has analyzed the system from the point of view of minimizing the delay. Each step may not take real long, but is death by 1000 cuts. Several different organizations are involved in each step. Tests are probably marshaled several different times in the process. Each time one waits for "enough" tests to accumulate, there is a delay. Obviously, I don't know this for a fact. However, given it is a system that has been created basically from nothing in the last 5 or 6 months, it is unlikely it is well optimized.

[Goose]

I wonder if some of this is supply chain.  Just because the manufacturing capacity exceeds demand, doesn't mean that there isn't a lag time between increased demand and when the supplies reach where they need to be in time to match the spike in supply.

Especially with travel impacted, and a lot of these supplies being manufactured on the other side of the world.

BC

I think this is potentially an issue, but six months in to the outbreak, you would expect the testing supply chain pipeline to be full by now. The purchasing people also should know what the lead times are, and I would expect the lead times should be going down, not up. Independent of the cause, if I am a lab who can't test because I don't have a reagent (for whatever reason), I would be screaming to the press and the public about it. We aren't seeing that.

I think it more probable that there are administrative delays that make the process take more time than it should. There are lots of "steps" in getting a sample from the test subject to the remote lab and back, and each one of those steps probably isn't optimized for speed. Nobody has analyzed the system from the point of view of minimizing the delay. Each step may not take real long, but is death by 1000 cuts. Several different organizations are involved in each step. Tests are probably marshaled several different times in the process. Each time one waits for "enough" tests to accumulate, there is a delay. Obviously, I don't know this for a fact. However, given it is a system that has been created basically from nothing in the last 5 or 6 months, it is unlikely it is well optimized.