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Maine manufacturer Puritan Medical Products will establish a second facility dedicated to the production of swabs for COVID-19 testing, company officials and lawmakers announced.
The company, which began as a toothpick manufacturer in Michigan more than 100 years ago, produces swabs for medical, diagnostic, forensic, environmental, and cleanroom applications at its facility in Guilford, Maine. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the company set up a second facility dedicated to COVID-19 diagnostic swabs some 30 miles south in Pittsfield, Maine.
The Waterville Morning Sentinel reports that Puritan and local construction company Cianbro will convert a former shoe factory in Pittsfield into its second COVID-19 swab facility. The project is expected to add 200 workers to the 400 Puritan jobs already created in the central Maine city.
Puritan officials plan to open the second facility at the beginning of next year. The project will be funded with more than $51 million in federal pandemic recovery dollars; the land and buildings were donated by the daughters of the late Terry Armstrong, the Maine native who co-founded San Antonio Shoemakers.
“The transfer of these buildings from the Economic Development Corp. allows Puritan to quickly build and begin producing additional medical swabs needed so urgently by our country,” Puritan general partner John Cartwright told the Morning Sentinel.
Puritan, the paper noted, is one of two major producers of COVID-19 testing swabs. The first Pittsfield facility began operating in May and currently produces 40 million swabs per month. Puritan expects to increase its capacity to 90 million per month by the middle of November.
The second Pittsfield site will be able to produce another 50 million each month.
Image Credit: Regent Street Clinic / Flickr
