ERIN EDGERTON/THE DAILY PROGRESS
An Abbott lab machine runs COVID-19 diagnostic tests at the University of Virginia Health System’s Core Lab. UVa is using four platforms from three different commercial diagnostic companies to run the tests.
Supply chain issues are still hampering the University of Virginia Health Systems’s COVID-19 test processing efforts.
UVa had a goal of running 3,000 tests a day by early June, but is currently only running about 750 tests a day due to material shortages, among other issues.
Melinda Poulter, director of clinical microbiology, said they’re not limited by the capacity of the instruments.
“If you add up the capacity of all of our instrumentation, theoretically, we should be able to do 3,000 tests today, and that was the goal,” she said. “But what we didn’t anticipate was all the supply chain problems, and the fact that although a company can give you an instrument that can do 1,000 or even 1,500 tests a day, they might not be able to provide you with enough reagents to do that every day.”
The Health System is using four platforms from three different commercial diagnostic companies to run the tests.
One, the Cepheid GeneXpert Infinity, could run nearly 1,500 tests a day, but the university was only initially allocated materials to run 100 tests a day. Poulter said they are reserving that test for patients where a fast answer is especially needed, and they had been saving about half of the materials, which the Health System is using now.
Last week, they were given enough materials to do 36 samples a day.
