It’s my understanding that most university medical centers, including UT Medical, have their own equipment to process tests. So the cost is for the test equipment which they’ve likely had for some time and the cost of personnel. I think that’s really about it.
Abbot Labs does a lot of work with university medical centers and they been shipping millions of their tests kits per week since receiving emergency approval. It’s my sense that the bulk of the cost of a test is in the processing which if you have your own lab decreases dramatically with volume. I think the turnaround time is less than 6.5 hours.
Quest, the big national lab co., has struggled to keep up with the increasing volume of tests they’ve been receiving and their backlog is the only reason for the insane turnaround times in publicly available testing.
This is just my guess based on what I’ve read because I haven’t found a direct answer, but I’m figuring if we’re doing say 1,000 tests a week to support our football program the incremental increase in cost to UT medical center might be less than $15,000 per week. That’s a very rough estimate. jmo.