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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

Likely not "at cost", since a for-profit company should be expected to be making a profit, but probably close, considering the herculean effort to get these things to market, despite the red tape.

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The Labcorp Pixel covid kit is a mail-in sample swap for a PCR test. The variable cost is magnitudes lower than $119.

There is also the variable cost of the technician needed to run the machine, no?

Lab techs will spend at maximum a couple minutes on each test, if they are manually preparing and pipetting samples, as the majority of the test is automated on a PCR thermocycler. At $30/hr that's $1/test in labor at most.

Edit: This isn't a total cost analysis, just labor like the person asked.

I imagine with breaks, lack of 100% focus and efficiency, and employment benefits it's probably $2-$3 in labor costs per test if you're right on the time required and average salary. So, I think possibly multiples of what you quoted, but still so low that it's not likely to affect the cost much.

Then again, with the people to move the samples around (process and sort mail), clean/sterilize testing materials after testing, and manage the people that perform the tests, and do quality testing, you might see another $1-$2 per test in labor costs. So maybe $5 in labor all said?

My bet is that the most expensive part of the process is the machines to do the tests, which likely cost multiples of a lab tech's salary (but maybe can do multiple tests at once? I dunno).

A sibling comment upthread noted that Maryland got 500k tests for $18 each, which sounds like it's probably close to cost, if it's the same test. That number of tests would be about full time work for 400 lab technicians for 5 days if they averaged just under two minutes a test.

Sure, for a routine clinical lab at your local hospital, but Labcorp is one of the largest ancillary lab networks in the world. I would be surprised if they haven't automated or processed out most of the manual labor for sample to diagnostic test.

For the extra labor I was referring to people actually receiving the mail, opening it and getting the samples into whatever tracking they have. My guess is that there's still real people doing that step, since a machine that can do that reliably and not screw up and/or contaminate systems with the weirdness they get in the mail is probably on the order of a machine that can accurate pick items out of bind in Amazon warehouses (or harder), and Amazon has thrown a lot of money at that just to find it's a lot harder than it seems. Even if it's just people receiving the mail and throwing it into a bin that's delivered to a specific lab tech, that still takes people.

The other labor was really just going by your own numbers.

Beyond that, there's still the layers of management above, that while there are physically less of them likely, their pay scales higher as well.

Genuine question: a lab tech in the US handling contegious virus samples for analysis costs only 30 bucks an hour? whats the salary of such a lab tech?

By the time it gets to the lab tech, it's unlikely that the virus would be as viable as it is when exiting the host. This would be especially true if the swab is put into some sort of preservation liquid (I don't know for this test, but often the nasopharyngeal swabs are put in such a fluid). Remember you don't care about the virus, you only care about its genome.

Even if the virus is viable, it's no longer airborne. You'd have to touch the swab and bring it to your face. Most of these labs handle things like HIV, so lab procedures and training guard against this sort of behavior. I wouldn't be surprised if they worked with shields as well.

In short, maybe they should be paid more, but it's not the danger factor that should govern in this particular case.

Typically lab techs are $25-$30/hr, and I doubt they get hazard pay for covid since they're handling contagious disease cultures on the regular. PPE is normally at a high standard for them.

Right, but isn't there capital costs associated with being able to run them?

You realize that the only reason this kit is so expensive is because the FDA previously shut down a bunch of at home testing companies products right?

In case people forgot the first step of the FDA was to shut down at home testing. Then they fast tracked Roche and Thermo Fischer.

Now a month later they approve an expensive at home testing kit. You take your own conclusions of this behaviour.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/23/updated-fda-covid-19-testi...

Note that most of the initial tests required a nasopharyngeal swab which has to go back into your nose several inches. I'm not surprised that the FDA doubts that people would be able to do that reliably on their own given that even trained people seem to get it wrong a lot (1).

The LabCorp test uses a swab that doesn't go anywhere near as deep (2). For a test kit to be widely distributed, you need to have it be drop dead simple to run perfectly.

Given all this, I'm not sure we should jump to corruption as the reason this is the first at-home test.

1.) https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-testing-fal...

2.) https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medtech/labcorp-s-at-home-coro...

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