Performance Issues With CDC’s COVID-19 Assay Reagent Slows Rollout Of Test Kits To US States

A reagent in a batch of COVID-19 tests shipped by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to state laboratories “wasn’t performing consistently,” a top CDC official says, so the agency is reformulating it – slowing down the labs’ ability to use the diagnostic, which yielded inconsistent results when quality-tested. But waiting in the wings are commercial coronavirus test kits being developed by Qiagen and Cepheid; both firms say they’ll submit the kits to the FDA for emergency-use approval.