Labs facing shortage of machines to process COVID-19 tests

A shortage of the machines that process COVID-19 tests and give results is slowing efforts to ramp up diagnostic testing, NPR reported. 

Both civilian labs and the Pentagon said they've had trouble getting the machines, which can run hundreds of diagnostic tests at once. 

Three machine manufacturers, Hologic, Roche and Abbott Laboratories, told NPR that demand for the machines is outpacing supply. 

Public health experts have said the machine shortages are further complicating the supply chain just as shortages of swabs, chemicals and other testing supplies have begun to ease. 

"We're gonna get stuck again," Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told NPR. "We keep sort of fixing one bottleneck, and testing gets a bit better, and then we get stuck with the next bottleneck."

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