During the first few months of the American coronavirus outbreak, the country experienced an acute shortage of test kits and related equipment — the supplies needed to track the spread of the virus and trace infected individuals.
The NP swabs are not your typical Q-tip. They are usually a 15-centimeter plastic stick, with a head that's about a centimeter and a half long and 3 millimeters wide. The neck of the swab is a little narrower, flexible and usually coated with a velvet-like material called flock, which allows efficient collection of the virus from deep in the upper respiratory passage.
“The beauty of 3D printing is that the time between a development of a design and a prototype in hand is a matter of hours. So you can get on a computer and you can draw on a computer the shape of the swab … and then you hit ‘enter,’ and it sends that design to a printer, and it is printed out just like that. … And if you look at it and decide it doesn’t work for you, you can change the design and get a new prototype back in again, in a matter of hours.
While successful clinical trials are not necessarily required to sell this type of product, NP swabs are still a medical device, and Arnaout says their manufacture “should be taken seriously.” But swabs were not the only component of COVID-19 testing kits in short supply. Worldwide supplies of VTM were also severely disrupted. This too motivated many scientists, chemists and companies to come up with innovative solutions.