What Happens To All Those COVID Test Nasal Swabs? That’s Where It Gets Complicated.
March 17, 2021USC
In early 2020, as the world watched in horror at the spread of COVID-19, Manoj Gopalkrishnan experienced a sense of déjà vu.
A little more than a decade earlier, Gopalkrishnan, Ph.D. CS ’08, had lived through the swine flu pandemic. Then, as now, Gopalkrishnan noted that an acute shortage of testing made it difficult for countries to fully assess the health crises they faced. That’s especially true with COVID because of the large number of asymptomatic carriers.
In the early days of COVID, a shortage of testing kits and chemical reagents made it nearly impossible for many people around the world, including Americans, to obtain a screening. That led to symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers spreading the virus largely unchecked. When the number of available COVID tests finally increased, that caused a whole new host of problems. Anxious patients sometimes had to wait up to two weeks to receive the results because swamped labs lacked the equipment and personnel to process tests expeditiously. In the meantime, the virus left a large swath of death and acute illness in its wake.