Labs ramp up for mandated COVID-19 tests

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Carolina COVID-19 testing labs are scaling up for enhanced demand as the Palmetto State’s largest employers anticipate rollout of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Some report that the industry is dealing with a shortage of testing kits. Others add that their company’s supply chain is doing just fine despite a warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about too few rapid tests in September.

“We’re the number one vendor for Thermofisher and Medline, so we will not have a supply chain issue,” said Nolan McBride, executive director of Mako Medical Laboratory. “We don’t forsee that. We have the capacity to run about 50,000 COVID [tests] a day and that will last about six months with the current supply we have.”

North Carolina-based Mako Medical Laboratory was selected by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control as one of four labs to process tests for the state’s school district testing sites. Mako Medical serves most of the Upstate districts including Greenville, York, Anderson, Spartanburg, Oconee and parts of Greenwood counties, according to McBride.

“We hope we don’t have to run 50,000 a day,” he added.

The S.C. Department of Education launched optional testing for employees and students in early September with the help of $155 million in funding from Washington, D.C., according to Education Superintendent Molly Spearman. 

She doesn’t expect that requirements for weekly testing in lieu of a vaccine for employees will be underway any time soon.

“I doubt any type of requirement would be from DHEC,” she told GSA Business Report. “I don’t anticpate that, but this, certainly, is an excellent tool we now have, because it means that we can get people back quicker from the quarantine or even if they are feeling sick, they have a site readily available that they can go to.”

Ryan Brown, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, reiterated on Oct. 12 that no plans were in the works for a mandate at this time and that a call with the U.S. Department of Labor the previous week on the topic had yielded little guidance, as the Labor Department has just started to get the ball rolling on the issue.

“We have no idea of what the mechanics would look like,” Brown said.

Vaccine mandate or no, Greenville’s Diversified Medical Health Care is preparing to expand its operations even further for an onslaught of Delta tests, a 35% increase in tests processed from last year, according to Kristina Loughrey, communications director of Diversified Medical Healthcare.

Since President Joe Biden announced the mandate, the lab has also seen an uptick in test samples, both from individuals and the large corporations it serves across all 50 states.

“As soon as the mandate came out, we’ve just been preparing ourselves for being able to support large businesses and schools, but really, we’ve been prepared all along, because right at the beginning of COVID, we became the first laboratory validated for COVID testing in the state of South Carolina,” said Loughrey. “In the summer, when there was sort of a lull in cases, laboratories kind of scaled back, but we did not do that. We kept building out our capabilities, because we anticpated another surge.”

Right now, Diversified Medical Health Care has three companies under one roof: manufacturing arm PT Medical, the medical equipment distributor Vessel Medical and Premier Medical, the testing lab. 

Sister company OnGen also develops proprietary laboratory information software, she said.

In the months to ahead, Vessel and CPT will relocate to give Premier more room to grow at its 6000 Pelham Road location, along with the addition of a new almost 50,000-square-foot suite. 

The new office will give the company’s R&D team, including one of the creators of the first FDA-approved COVID-19 tests, more breathing room, while Diversified Medical Healthcare hires on more lab assessioners.

“We’ve invested in state-of-the-art automation equipment, which automates a lot of the laboratory processes,” she said. “That’s the reason why we have one of the largest testing capacities in the nation. We can process up to 300,000 specimens per day.”

As for supply chain snags, Loughrey reported a shortage in testing supplies, including saliva-collection kits and nasopharangial and nairs swabs, but Diversified Medical Healthcare’s manufacturing arm has has helped ease bottlenecks at the company.

“That is one area that has slowed things down in being able to provide testing for a lot of testing entities and having testing capacity is a major issue,” she said about supply chain hold ups.  “Having the automation equipment, that meets that need. Every time there’s been a roadblock, we’ve really thought through what we can do to help improve testing as a whole.”