2023: The decline of COVID-19 testing

2023 will be a pivotal year for many diagnostic companies as they move away from Covid-19 testing to other ventures. Companies are looking to diversify offers, use research from Covid-19 test development into other tests, and reinvest R&D into other diseases. We will see a shift towards companies producing rapid tests and home testing kits that can be used by the public and a focus on point-of-care (POC) tests as opposed to laboratory tests.

GlobalData predicts that Covid-19 testing and other related products will continue to drop in 2023. Large diagnostic companies such as Abbot, Danaher, Labcorp, BD, and Roche made statements at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference on the significant drops in Covid-19 tests and related products in 2022. Danaher redefined the “base of business core sales growth” to exclude Covid-19 testing from their revenue as the continued decline of Covid-19 would highly impact their revenue reporting. Abbott highlighted that although there will be a drop in Covid-19 testing alone, there will be increased testing in respiratory diseases such as multiparameter tests to differentiate between Covid-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus. However, they stressed that the growth will be close to pre-pandemic growth, implying that we will not see a huge spike in revenue as seen in 2020 and 2021. These changes are indicative of a shrinking Covid-19 market. Therefore, many of these companies are shifting their R&D towards developing POC tests and over-the-counter tests to not only decrease turnover time on test results but to also cater to more individuals who are interested in getting involved in their own healthcare.