Tennessee Accidentally Lists COVID-19 Testing Materials on Auction Site

Tennessee officials said that the state accidentally posted a list of 13 pallets of COVID-19 testing materials, as well as other supplies on an auction.

In a report, the state unintentionally listed the items on a government liquidation webpage called GovDeals.com, but immediately deleted them last Thursday, following a query from The Tennessean newspaper, asking about the auction.

Officials told the news outlet it was just an accidental listing. According to the spokesman for Tennessee's COVID-19 Unified Command Team, Dean Flener, the listing on the auction page was an outcome of an internal processing mistake.

Flener added that supplies should have been saved yet were unintentionally categorized as "surplus" and thus were listed for auction.

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Auction Listing

In an email, the warehouse of the State of Tennessee has separate sections for its storage and for surplus materials to be sold.

Flener added that during internal movement, the pallets were labeled as surplus when they should have stayed in storage.

The Tennessean reported the auction had received a $150-worth bid before the accidentally listed items were removed.

GovDeals did not provide a complete listing of the supplies. However, images of labels and items revealed the pallets comprised an undetermined number of SteriPack nasal swabs and millions of test sample transport medium, small tubes used to hold nasal swabs while being transported to a laboratory.

Reports said the listed supplies were described as "new, sealed, and unused." A picture displayed the package label, mentioning the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, which provides governments in crisis with supplies.

The label indicated that the supplies were in the package and designed in support of COVID-19. The spokesman said that he had no other information on how Tennessee got the supplies or if they were from FEMA.

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Tennessee's Testing Infrastructure

A report recently said that the COVID-19 supplies' apparent liquidation was striking as some of these similar items were very much short of supply not so long ago.

In March, when the pandemic first hit Tennessee, Nashville's testing centers sat unused for several weeks as the city government could not acquire an adequate supply of swabs to open them.

The state apparently controlled COVID-19 testing because of limited supplies until the middle of April, when the governor shared the list of symptoms to check to all residents.

Tennessee officials regularly boast about the state's testing infrastructure, where it has conducted more than 2.5 million tests as of Thursday. However, many experts in the field of medicine contend that testing in the United States falls far short of what is required to end the health crisis.

Experts are also apprehensive that the season could worsen the pandemic by forcing Americans inside and overlap with a forthcoming flu season in the coming winter, creating the "twin pandemics."

In August, the Rockefeller Foundation and Duke University scientists approximated that the U.S. could need as much as 200 million each month to keep both the nursing homes and schools open safely, roughly eight times the country's present testing levels.

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