Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp to ramp up coronavirus testing to 300,000 tests per week

Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp announced Tuesday they will now be able to process more than 300,000 COVID-19 tests by the end of the week, the CEOs of the two companies said in an interview with CNBC. LabCorp CEO Adam Schechter said the company will soon be able to process more than 100,000 tests weekly while Quest Diagnostics will soon have the capacity to run around 200,000 tests per week.

Currently, Quest Diagnostics conducts about 25,000 COVID-19 tests per day. The company plans to increase its daily capacity to around 30,000 by the end of the week, CEO Steve Rusckowski said. “By the end of this week we’re going to have significantly more testing capacity in this country than we had only a week or so ago,” Rusckowski added.

Quest began processing its test on March 9 while LabCorp’s test became available a few days earlier.“It’s not just about LabCorp,” he said. “When you think about the other national, regional, local labs, academic medical centers, hospitals and the state labs, everybody is increasing capacity.”

As of the time of writing, there are at least 49,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S., including over 600 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

There are calls to increase coronavirus (COVID-9) testing in the US to prevent asymptomatic people from further spreading the virus to vulnerable people like seniors and people with existing heath issues.