Demand for PCR tests in the county quadrupled from 600 weekly tests in July to 2,500 a week in September. That mass-testing operation recently moved back to its original location at the county fairgrounds after a summer stint in a small church parking lot. (Rae Ellen Bichell/KHN)Įven in a place such as Longmont, near many laboratories and hospitals, PCR samples from the local mass-testing site get shipped by air each evening to a lab in North Carolina. “Anything you do with PCR is going to take an extra day because it’s got to be flown or driven a ways.” The mass COVID-19 testing operation in Longmont recently moved back to its original location at the Boulder County Fairgrounds after a summer stint in a small church parking lot. “Northern Maine is a good example,” Aspinall said. Something as simple as proximity also still dictates how quickly test-takers get results. “The staffing shortage is very, very real and holding people back from increasing capacity,” she said. Testing labs of all stripes are also facing worker shortages just like restaurants, said Mara Aspinall, co-founder of Arizona State University’s biomedical diagnostics program, who also writes a weekly newsletter monitoring national testing capacity and serves on the board of a rapid-testing company. But they are still bearing a large testing load, which she had expected to shift more to commercial or hospital-based labs by now. Public health labs are no longer hamstrung by supply bottlenecks on individual test components such as swabs or reagents, said Kelly Wroblewski, director of infectious disease programs for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. But people are also facing problems getting molecular testing, including the gold-standard PCR tests. The White House said in early October it plans to buy $1 billion worth of rapid antigen tests to help improve access to the hard-to-find over-the-counter kits. Unpredictable waits can be a problem for those trying to plan travel, return to school from a quarantine - or even get lifesaving monoclonal antibody treatment within the optimal window if they do have COVID.