"On April 22, three container trucks carrying parts of a Swiss-made Cobas 6800 Analyser arrived at the National Health Laboratory in Yangon to much fanfare. Donated by a local company, AA Pharmaceutical, the machine was trumpeted as a gamechanger in Myanmar’s response to COVID-19, because it would enable a significant scaling-up of testing. Previously the NHL had been conducting just a few hundred tests a day, up to a maximum daily capacity of around 300. From early May, the Ministry of Health and Sports said, it would be able to conduct an additional 1,400 tests a day with the Cobas analyser. Further steps were soon taken to boost testing capacity. The Department of Medical Research also began conducting COVID-19 tests on April 23, and the ministry revealed plans to establish new laboratories outside Yangon. Meanwhile, a few days after the donated machine arrived at the NHL, the military announced it had two more of the Cobas machines available, and offered to use them to test samples from civilians. Yet, in spite of these initiatives, testing barely increased for almost a month. Only since mid-May has the number of tests regularly hit 500 a day. By June 9, only 38,123 tests had been performed overall in a country of 54 million. Support independent journalism in Myanmar. Sign up to be a Frontier member. The slow scale-up of testing suggests there is no silver bullet. A range of factors need to be in place to test on a wide scale – not just the machines to perform the tests, but also testing kits, chemical reagents, human resources, supply chains and policies..."