The Biden administration has started shipping monkeypox tests to commercial laboratories, in a bid to speed diagnoses for suspected infections for the virus that has already infected at least 142 people in the U.S.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is sending tests to labs, including Aegis Science, Labcorp, Mayo Clinic Laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and Sonic Healthcare, which it said would significant expand the nation's health system's capacity to test for monkeypox. Previously, testing has largely been confined to public health labs, which combined have a capacity of about 8,000 tests per week.
