[sgw928]

The situation is similar in WA state, where the current bottleneck is specimen collection, as there is a shortage of swabs, vials, PPE and personnel. This results in large amount of existing lab capacity, such as at UW Virology labs, not being used. Skipping RNA extraction definitely helps with expanding lab capacity in places where that's the current bottleneck, but isn't the most pressing thing in WA.

[loeg]

The other bottleneck in WA is that the state's multimillion dollar, IBM-contracted data collection program can't keep up ingesting a few thousand records a day.

[sgw928]

That's just for public data reporting, so doesn't stop people from actually doing tests.

[loeg]

Just realtime analysis, which is also very important.

[kitteh]

Yes - this has been falling over for the past week.

[loeg]

Yep, starting March 28 (or sooner).