But the biggest reason that the Biohub’s free testing service went underused was the scarcity of test kits. Actually, that’s not quite right. If at any point in the first few months of the pandemic you rolled into a hospital parking lot with a dry cough and a fever and asked to be tested and the nurses said, “Sorry, we have no testing kits,” what they likely meant was: “We have no nasal swabs.” The long translucent sticks that could be inserted deep into the nasal passage, and which offered the only reliable method to sample the virus at the start of the pandemic, were nowhere to be found.