Using Parallel Evaporators To Escalate COVID-19 Test Kit Preparation

By Dr. Induka Abeysena, Portfolio Manager, Genevac

At the time of publication, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has now spread to 209 countries and provinces, and confirmed infections have surpassed 3.1 million worldwide. Governments around the world are currently working hard to minimize the impact of the virus.

In addition to stringent social distancing measures introduced in many countries, testing is critical to controlling the spread of the virus. If infected individuals can be identified, they and anyone else they have recently contacted can enter quarantine to prevent onward transmission.

The success already seen in some countries at limiting their number of cases has been attributed to early and extensive implementation of testing, for example, in South Korea and Germany. However, other countries such as the USA and UK have been slower off the mark.

An issue for all countries now is how to obtain a sufficient supply of testing kits, when the international demand for them has never been higher.

As laboratories around the world scale up their production of PCR test kits to aid the global fight against the virus, improvements to the workflow for producing testing kits are urgently needed to increase the efficiency of test kit production. Centrifugal evaporators offer an ideal solution to improving the efficiency of test kit production.