New York is opening its own virus testing lab to address shortages

The lab is on the 12th floor of a building at First Avenue and East 29th Street and is run by a small robotics company. Credit...Matt Monas Photography

After months of complaints about testing delays, New York City officials will announce Thursday that they have opened a lab in Manhattan that will significantly reduce wait times. New York City is preparing for its most ambitious reopening yet, with public school classes and indoor dining set to begin this month.

Officials said the new facility will prioritize New York City residents, meaning turnaround times of 24-48 hours, rather than relying on large lab companies that have been inundated with demand from across the country as the virus continues to spread. backlog).

The lab is expected to process more tests for city residents than any other within weeks, a rare bright spot for New Yorkers who have endured countless hardships in getting tested for the coronavirus since March. Dilemma.

“This will give us greater capacity in terms of volume,” said Dr. Jay Varma, a City Hall consultant who plays a leading role in the city’s coronavirus response. "This will also give us control because this is a lab that is truly dedicated to New York City."

New York City has one of the most ambitious coronavirus testing programs in the country, testing more than 200,000 people a week, or more than 2% of the city's residents. The new lab started processing tests this week and should eventually help expand that significantly.

The lab is on the 12th floor of a building at First Avenue and East 29th Street and is run by Opentrons, a small robotics company. But New York City played an important role in the lab's creation, city officials said. Currently, New York City and its public hospital system are the lab's only customers.

Officials at City Hall and Opentrons said the new lab, dubbed the "Pandemic Response Laboratory," will initially process thousands of tests per day, primarily from samples collected at testing sites operated by the city's public hospital system.

But the lab is expected to eventually be able to test more than 40,000 samples per day, possibly including some from public school students and teachers, depending on need.

As of Wednesday morning, the lab had returned test results for the first 712 samples it had received and is currently processing about 3,000 samples a day, a spokesman for the lab said, with that number expected to rise significantly next week.

Public health officials hope that, for the first time since the coronavirus arrived in New York City, testing will no longer be a scarce resource.

The new lab is the latest in a long-running effort by the city to address a host of issues that have plagued testing efforts. The problems date back to February and March, when as the virus began to spread in New York City and its suburbs, a series of missteps and disastrous decisions by the federal government left few people eligible for testing — even if they showed clear signs of COVID-19. COVID-19 symptoms.

Initially, the federal government had a monopoly on testing while New York City worked to develop its own testing capabilities. Initially, shortages of testing reagents, chemicals and even swabs to collect samples made the work slow.

Over the next few months, the largest national labs dramatically ramped up testing capacity, and New York City came to rely on them to handle the majority of local testing. But this summer, as the pandemic worsened in other parts of the country, some labs like Quest Diagnostics were overwhelmed.

This has resulted in test result wait times of up to 2 to 3 weeks in New York. It's clear to public health officials that New York City needs more testing infrastructure that can be controlled, or at least relied upon.

Dr. Varma said: "We will get to the scale of testing capacity that we think is critical."

As hundreds of thousands of students in public school systems return to classroom instruction, students and teachers will be forced to get tested, and the added testing capacity could come in handy. As flu season approaches and cold cases increase, demand for testing is likely to increase as New Yorkers may be dealing with symptoms that may or may not have COVID-19.

“We know we really need to maximize our testing capacity in the fall,” Dr. Varma said.

Opentrons, the robotics company that will operate the laboratory, specializes in the automation of research laboratories. Three robotic arms will move trays, each containing about 380 samples, between different testing stations, said Jonathan Brennan-Badal, the company's chief executive.

The lab hopes to begin pooling samples, which is grouping multiple samples together and testing them as one.