Emergency airlift brings 500,000 swabs, sample kits to US markets

A joint effort between the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD) last week yielded 500,000 swabs and sample kits for COVID-19 testing that otherwise would have been stranded in Italy.

The supplies, produced by the Italian company Copan Diagnostics, Inc., had informed the U.S. government that they were no longer able to ship swabs and sample kits to U.S. distributors as a result of the border closures and flight cancellations swamping Europe. However, Copan is one of the major suppliers of such items to the United States, creating a potential shortage of supplies critical for diagnostic testing.

“An emergency military delivery of 500,000 collection kits from a manufacturer in Italy who has enough supplies to sell outside Europe is exactly the kind of public-private cooperation and whole-of-government approach that has characterized the Trump Administration’s response to COVID-19,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said. “Thanks to this quick coordination among agencies and the private sector, private diagnostic companies will have the ability to provide rapid tests for hundreds of thousands of more Americans.”

An emergency airlift brought the products from Italy to Memphis, Tenn. FedEx took over, shipping the products to several diagnostic companies throughout the country.

Airlifts also look to be the new standard, with HHS stating that such actions have now been established as a means of distributing swabs and COVID-19 collection kits to the United States without interruption of supply lines.