About Adam Schechter
In an October 2020 interview, Labcorp CEO Adam Schechter discussed the company's COVID-19 testing capacity and preparations for the flu season. Schechter stated that Labcorp had increased its testing capacity from 2,000-3,000 tests per day in March to over 200,000 tests per day, and that the company was continuing to expand by purchasing additional machines and reagents. He noted that Labcorp was receiving about 100,000 samples per day on average and that its labs operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Schechter also described three types of COVID-19 tests—PCR, antigen, and antibody—and said that while PCR is considered the gold standard, antigen tests are useful for surveillance despite being less accurate.
Schechter addressed concerns about testing turnaround times, stating that while results typically take about 24 hours, he disagreed with the view that tests become useless after two days, arguing that a three-day result could still help individuals decide whether to return to work. He encouraged the public to get flu vaccinations, practice social distancing, wear masks, and maintain good hygiene, even after receiving a negative test result. Schechter also noted that Labcorp had launched a combined test for flu, RSV, and COVID-19 using a single nasal swab.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Adam Schechter's recent appearances.
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Transcript (13 segments)
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Interviewer0:10
Good morning to you.
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Adam Schechter0:13
Good morning, Margaret. Thanks for having me here today.
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Interviewer0:16
Sure. You know, we heard that the president reportedly did take a PCR test, that kind of gold standard test, to confirm his initial diagnosis. How reliable are the different testing platforms that we're talking about?
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Adam Schechter0:37
Sure. There's really three types of tests. There's the PCR test, as you mentioned, that tests for the genetic material of the virus. It's seen as the gold standard, but it does take time to get the results. For that test, when we receive a test, it takes us about 24 hours on average to return the results. The second test is an antigen test, and the third type of test is an antibody test, which is a blood test. The first two are nasal swabs typically. The blood test searches for antibodies in your blood that tells you if you've had the virus in the past.
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Interviewer1:23
Is the kind of tool that the White House was using, these rapid tests, is that sufficient to detect the virus in asymptomatic people, in your view?
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Adam Schechter1:31
Yeah, so the type of test that the White House was using, the Abbott test, is a PCR test, but it's not running as many iterations as the PCR tests that we run. I think it's an acceptable test to try to screen for people, but it's certainly not sufficient. There's no doubt that people should continue to wear masks, socially distance, practice good hygiene, even if they have a negative result from that.
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Interviewer2:11
What do you need to do to avoid those backlogs as we get into the fall and winter?
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Adam Schechter2:19
Yeah, we've been building capacity since March of last year. We started from scratch, able to do two to three thousand tests per day. We can now do over two hundred thousand tests per day. On average, we're receiving about a hundred thousand samples per day, so we have additional capacity, but we're not stopping there. We're building more and more capacity. At the same time, we need people to do their part as we go into flu season: get flu vaccinations, socially distance, wear masks, practice good hygiene. We also launched a combined test where you can test with one nasal swab.
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Interviewer3:10
Results in two days, which is what Dr. Fauci says is necessary to actually be useful. Why should your company be paid?
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Adam Schechter3:20
So we are doing everything we can to turn around those results as fast as possible. Every one of our sixty-five thousand LabCorp employees around the world are working day and night. Our labs are open seven days a week, running 24 hours a day. There's no reimbursement that's going to cause us to move faster than we can. We want to move as fast as we possibly can. These are our friends, our families, our neighbors, so we're doing everything we can. But I would say that as the turnaround time is longer, the usefulness of the test, particularly for tracking and tracing, is less. There's no doubt about it, but I disagree that it's useless after two days because...
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Interviewer4:11
So are you saying clearly that LabCorp does not anticipate a backlog if we see infections continue to rise in the U.S.? Can you avoid what happened this summer?
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Adam Schechter4:25
So we are building capacity every single day. We're at 200,000 tests a day right now, and we will not stop. We're buying every machine we can, getting as much reagent as we can, doing everything we can to prepare for the fall flu season. But I really do encourage people to help us by getting the flu shot, by practicing social distancing, wearing masks. We know they work. So if we do all those things, I think we're going to be in a good position going into the flu season.
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Interviewer4:50
All right, Mr. Schechter, thank you very much.
