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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

Too bad they couldn’t partner with Amazon and have a “get it by tomorrow” option.

As long as the current COVID protocols stay in place (people needing or feeling they need to get tested after every possible COVID exposure, testing young children any time they have a runny nose so they can go to daycare, etc), I doubt that the supply chain will ever be able to support the number of tests demanded. If you run the numbers it's pretty insane how many of those test-kits would be needed.

It's a crying shame that we didn't have two years of warning to get production up to meet demand.

I mean without understanding the material constraints behind manufacturing of the tests it would be hard to say what the upper limit of our ability to manufacture them really is. We make lots of things in large quantities if we really need them.

Amazon's own private (in stock) Covid PCR test collection kits take at least 3 days to deliver. There's no "get it by tomorrow" option. That may end up being faster delivery than covidtests.gov, but let's not pretend that Amazon is the one to save us.

In an ideal setup they’d have sufficient tests stored in Post Offices for next day delivery.

Logistically speaking, I wonder how partnering with Amazon was not the cheapest and fastest solution.

Or even Walmart. Most of my BinaxNow tests shipped via Walmart within a week.

In a sense, that's what happened for three months last year. The government worked w/ Walmart (and, I think Amazon and another retailer) to sell the BinaxNow tests at cost and ship them to consumers.

* Yes, "at cost" != free - but the idea was to leverage the retailers' distribution capabilities.

I ordered two more on Amazon and they won't be here until February.

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