SWABS, STAT

Inside the Maine factory racing to supply America with virus test swabs

- DEENA SHANKER

Puritan Medical swabs at the company’s plant in Guilford.

If you’ve ever used a home DNA kit, opened wide and said “ahh,” or measured the depth of a knife wound in a stabbing victim, chances are you’ve used a device made by Puritan Medical Products Co. And if you’re tested for the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, it’s quite likely the swab used to collect a sample from your nose will come from Puritan, too.

Located in Guilford, Maine (pop. 1,521), Puritan is one of two companies that make essentially all of the swabs used for coronavirus testing. (The other, Copan Diagnostics Inc., is in Italy, one of the epicenters of the deadly disease.) If swabs are necessary for testing, and if testing is crucial to slowing the virus’s spread, then it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the world’s future depends, at least in part, on Puritan.

“Swabs could be a weak link in broadening testing,” former U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb tweeted on March 16. That was four days after Puritan first started getting calls from the U.S. government, according to Timothy Templet, executive vice president for global sales, who entered the conversations himself shortly thereafter. “I’ve been on the phone since Saturday with many government organizations—Health and Human Services, FDA, working groups—just trying to p rovide accurate information regarding the ability to produce as many swabs for the country as we possibly can,” he says. The federal government doesn’t buy directly from Puritan, however; it helps coordinate with Puritan and other medical suppliers and distributors to get the swabs to where they need to go.