Asymptomatic test market forecast- Take Australia as an example.
As an analyst and go-to-market strategist in the health care industry responsible for qPCR and Assay products, COVID product is our base currently. However, as the vaccination, healthy protocols, and treatments mature, we face a post-covid age challenge. Asymptomatic testing is getting more and more critical in the post-covid age. I want to introduce my point of view of making a forecast on the Asumtomatic market and take Australia as my example.
Start with the asymptomatic application field; I split the topic into four key areas.
1. Travel
2. Entertainment
3. School
4. Work
I also want to highlight currently, for pooling solution in Australia, the test number against reaction number is 5:1, meaning to say 5 test samples in 1 reaction. The assumption here is that for each test, it is only for asymptomatic or for diagnostic purposes.
Travel
I take the arrival and departure data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics(ABS) to calculate how many people would fly in out and assume that the person needs to take a one-time test for each fly-in or fly-out.
Take Aug-20 to Jul-21 as a full-year assumption as it is like a rolling concept. Now we have a wild population of annual arrivals of 553,000 and yearly departures of 709,000. The total is 1,262,000. As the pooling methodology, the total assay needed is 252,400 reactions. The above estimation is relatively conservative because the travel population has been dropped significantly since the outbreak. If you consider a bold calculation, you can use the data before COVID.
Entertainment
My assumption for entertainment activities includes sports/activities but does not consider films or other art activities. According to the data from ABS, 5.2 million people aged 15 years reported that they were involved in organized sport and physical activity. The activity has happened at least once in the past 12 months. Using 5,200,000 and considering pooling, it needs 1,040,000 reactions per year to support people go back to everyday life. This number doesn’t even think people who activate more than one time per year.
School
I’ve collected the student number in Australia from ABS as below.
Assume each student will need a test once in two weeks. There are around four million students enrolled, meaning that 4,000,000 times 26 divided by 5 (pooling )equals 20,800,000 reactions per year is needed. You can adjust the number by timing a percentage that you think is better to reflect the reality you know.
Work
Back to work is the most complicated part of estimating. I took the data of 15–64 years, employed total Persons(data collection in Aug-21, from ABS) as the entire labor force base(12,325,000 people). Generally speaking, industries such as mining, high-tech, and others need to work closely in an area that would require the test more frequently. Here I use a simple 70% of the base would need the test once in two weeks. The total number of reactions is 44,863,000 reactions per year. As mentioned, you can focus on specific industries just based on the portion of which industries count.
Conclusion
We have a total of around 67M reaction needs per year for the asymptomatic test in Australia. Now here is the question, as a company, how can we grab this market? My suggestion is:
(1)To partner with distributors such as laboratories, hospitals, and teacher universities to expand the capacity and networks.
(2) To penetrate governments and guilds for more product visibilities and sample trying. We need to find a pilot as our success story.
The critical success factor is that we have to reduce the complexities and efforts for our end users when they are taking the tests, and our product and protocols have to save the efforts for organizations.
