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Quest Diagnostics CEO Steve Rusckowski told CNBC on Thursday the company was seeing an increase in Covid-19 testing as the most contagious delta variant spread across the country.
“We said our Covid-19 testing activity would decline as we see the resumption of, if you will, the pandemic and it has declined throughout the first half of the year,” Rusckowski said on “Closing Bell”. “Over the past two weeks, and we believe this is related to the delta variant, we have also started to see a slight increase in this volume of Covid testing. “
Rusckowski, who was CEO of Dutch health technology company Philips Healthcare before joining Quest in 2012, said Quest uses next-generation sequencing to deliver Covid test results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The majority of positive tests identified by the company this week were of the delta variant, he said.
The highly transmissible delta strain is causing a further increase in cases and deaths in the United States, especially in largely unvaccinated communities. This has raised concerns among health experts and local officials across the country, some of whom have started to re-impose and advise indoor mask mandates for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
More than 162 million people in the United States are fully vaccinated – about 49% of the nation’s population – despite the rate of vaccines administered daily which continues to decline sharply, according to a CDC tracker.
While Rusckowski noted a slight increase in Covid testing, Dr Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Thursday morning that while he believes the current spike in delta infections may be over sooner than expected, it is difficult to confirm. because people are tested much less frequently now than before.
“Vaccinated people don’t show up for testing, and a lot of young, healthy people who are mostly infected right now are also not showing up for testing,” said Gottlieb, former head of Food and Drug. Administration.
As the U.S. healthcare system sees people returning for in-person medical visits, Quest also posted better-than-expected results in the second quarter with a resumption of activity in its non-Covid services, such as cancer testing. , cardiovascular disease and infectious disease. and neurology.
The New Jersey-based medical testing company reported adjusted earnings per share of $ 3.18 on revenue of $ 2.55 billion. Analysts were expecting EPS of $ 2.87 and revenue of $ 2.38 billion, according to Refinitiv. Revenue was up 39.5% from the previous year when the company announced adjusted EPS of $ 1.42.
The company expects annual revenue to be between $ 9.54 billion and $ 9.79 billion.
“Our core business dropped significantly in April of last year. Our core business was no more than 50%, and we just started in March of last year talking about our Covid testing,” said Rusckowski. “Today we actually have about 300,000 test capacities per day. It was zero in March of last year. So in the second quarter of last year our core business was down and we are just starting to set up our Covid tests. “
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