Raj Shah: We Need To Go from 100K Tests Per Day to 1 Million Tests Per Day at a Minimum

EXCERPT:

SHAH: "Well, thank you for having me and happy Easter. I’ll start by just saying that this is actually a tremendous crisis, and the first thing we have to do to get people back to work and to protect essential workers, which include all the folks that Paul mentioned but also the frontline health workers who are — my sister is a physician — who are rushing into the hospital to take care of folks who have COVID-19. And the reality is, to protect that population, broadly speaking, we need to move from hundreds of thousands of tests a day to many millions of tests a day at a minimum. And that’s going to take a big national effort. It’s going to take a lot of public investment. It’s going to take cities and states all working together with the federal government. We need biotechnology companies, scientists, university labs, all working together to achieve that goal because we’re at war and we can win it, but we can only win it with a broad effort around testing. I think we’ve seen a number of very promising efforts including from Abbott, the new test that they’re rolling out in Detroit and some other cities. We see a whole host of serum antibody tests that could potentially identify who has immunity. But the first goal has to just be scaling up access to the traditional PCR testing so we know who has the virus, who doesn’t. We can do it cheaply, people get results within minutes. The technology, we think, is there. It’s about having a national strategy and a big public-private collaboration."