As New York City heads into a dangerous new phase of the pandemic, city officials are relying on its significantly expanded testing capacity driven by its own COVID-19 testing lab that opened three months ago.
The Manhattan facility, housed on the 12th floor of a science complex on First Avenue and East 29th Street, is arguably the city's biggest weapon in the fight against a second wave: the lab can currently process tests for 20,000 people a day.
In one month, that number could grow to tests for as many as 100,000 people a day. With all of its labs combined, the city currently tests around 75,000 to 100,000 people in a day. During the early part of the crisis, they could only test only a few hundred samples a day.
The lab's turnaround time is relatively fast. Results are known about 11 and a half hours after a sample is processed.
Following a brief tour on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio reminded reporters that the lab, which is known as the pandemic response lab, was the result of an initiative from the city's Economic Development Corporation. In the spring officials solicited and reviewed eight proposals. Out of those, they chose Opentrons, a small robotics firm based in Brooklyn, because of its ability to get a facility up and running quickly and relatively cheaper cost—$28 per test as opposed to $100 charged by national private labs.
During the summer, when testing turnaround time in New York City was strained by increased national demand, much of the supply concern was focused on the restocking of reagents, chemical ingredients needed to process the tests. The city's pandemic response lab currently has a three month supply of reagents.
"This is a homegrown solution," said Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday afternoon, following a tour of the facility.
Workers sitting at cubicle stations inside the city's pandemic response lab.
In addition to meeting the surge in demand due to the holidays, the city's increased testing capacity comes as roughly 190,000 of the city's public elementary and special education students prepare to return to the classroom next week. Under the new reopening plan, 20% of students will be tested weekly, a feat that the mayor said would not have been possible without the new lab.
City officials said that a student tested on Monday should receive their test result on Wednesday at the latest.
Looking ahead, de Blasio said the lab was "the start of a bigger effort" to prepare the city for future global health challenges but also, given the large number of respected hospitals and research institutions, to make it "the public health capital of the world."
On Thursday, city officials officially announced the creation of a new pandemic response institute, which would expand beyond lab work and into training and research of outbreaks. The institute will initially be housed at the same science complex as the lab. The city expects to select an organization to operate it beginning next year.
The facility is staffed by about 110 people, but the processing of tests is largely performed by robots. To help with faster turnover, tests are also pooled, a method where samples are grouped together and tested as one.
The lab processes only PCR tests, which stands for "polymerase chain reaction," the method that enables the detection and amplification of minute amounts of a virus’s genetic material.
PCR tests are generally considered the gold standard of COVID tests. According to Opentrons, the technique used by the pandemic response lab is among the most sensitive when it comes to detecting traces of the virus.
Unlike the New York state's health department, the city currently only reports PCR test results. But Dr. Jay Varma, the mayor's top health advisor, on Wednesday said health officials were planning soon to publish antigen results on its website. City officials estimated that around 4,000 to 5,000 antigen tests are performed on New Yorkers each day. The results, however, are less reliable than PCR tests.
During a walk-through, reporters could inspect close-up the various automated processes. Enclosed inside glass cases, mechanical arms extract, move and prepare the samples from glass vials into plastic trays, all at a speed, quantity and precision that could not be matched by humans.
"Scientifically, it's the same process," said Will Canine, the co-founder of Opentrons. "We've just operationalized it so it's faster and cheaper."
