(CNN) – US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said the United States should have the capacity to perform about a million novel coronavirus tests by the end of the week.
“Our expectation in talking to the company that’s scaling this up, is that we should have the capacity by the end of the week to have kits available to the laboratories to perform about a million tests,” Hahn explained.
During the Senate Health hearing on response to coronavirus, Hahn was pushed to explain how he thinks the US could do a million tests when to date, it has only been able to perform about 3,600 tests.
Hahn expanded saying, “I want to distinguish between the ability to get the test kits out to the laboratories with the ability with the labs to actually do the test.”
Hahn said the FDA has been working very closely with all manufactures to build on this platform that CDC has developed. The company it is using has “estimated they are going to be able to scale up to deliver 2,500 kits by the end of the week to providers of the test.”
