If the story of the United States’ initial response to the novel coronavirus was one of federal health agencies utterly failing to provide enough testing, the story of the next phase is of the same organizations trying like hell to catch up. Just over a month ago, the Trump administration shifted away from its previous heel-dragging and started pushing testing more aggressively, allowing more labs to screen people for the disease. Instead of sending every sample from around the country to CDC headquarters in Atlanta, as the FDA required in February, health care workers could send samples to many other labs to have the analysis done.
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But while the capacity is headed in the right direction, it’s just not enough yet. Some people are still waiting up to two weeks for test results—more than enough time to go from reasonably healthy to dying of Covid-19. Most samples are analyzed at labs run by large companies like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp that process big quantities of diagnostic tests. But sending out the samples, waiting for them to be processed, and getting the result takes hours or even days. Sometimes samples aren’t sent individually and have to wait to be sent with a batch. It’s essentially a smaller version of the same problem that we had before: Instead of a single bottleneck at the CDC, there are many smaller bottlenecks around the country.
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A new trend promises to open up these bottlenecks. A wide range of companies are developing tests that can be deployed to hospitals, doctor’s offices, airports and—maybe—even people’s homes. These machines, generally the size of a countertop kitc