Remember back in the spring when Abbott, Quest and other COVID-19 testing laboratories announcing that test demand was falling fast and cautioning Wall Street investors to tone down their revenue expectations for the remainder of the 2021 fiscal year? Those days now feel like a distant memory. The turning point came in July when after steadily dropping for the first six months of the year, the number of daily COVID-19 tests performed began to rise again. In August, the U.S. processed an average of 1.9 million tests per day, the highest total since April. As the Delta variant continues to fuel a surge in new cases, demand for COVID-19 tests and the profits of the companies that produce them are expected to keep on increasing. Recent COVID-19 Testing Utilization Patterns While nobody expected testing labs and producers to be able to sustain the COVID-19 revenue windfalls of 2020 and 2021, it looked like the vaccination would put an end to the boom sooner than anybody had expected. As vaccination efforts picked up in the early part of the year, demand for COVID-19 testing peaked in January and February. Big testing laboratories began demobilizing the COVID-19 infrastructure they had worked so […]