Quest Diagnostics said July 6 that increased demand for COVID-19 diagnostic testing in the South, Southwest and West has exceeded its capacity and, as a result, has increased its labs' average turnaround time to deliver test results to patients.
On June 29 Quest said the average turnaround time to deliver results was one day for the highest priority patients and three to five days for all other patients. Now, average turnaround time for high priority patients remains at one day, but for all other patients it is four to six days.
"We are doing everything we can to bring more COVID-19 testing to patients in the United States at this critical time. This week, we intend to ramp up our capacity to reach 120,000 molecular diagnostic tests a day, compared to 115,000 last week. Over the month of July, we will continue to ramp up our capacity to reach 150,000 molecular diagnostic tests a day," Quest said in a news release.
As of July 6, Quest has performed about 6.6 million COVID-19 diagnostic tests and 2.4 million COVID-19 antibody tests.
Read the full news release here.