Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used in molecular biology to rapidly make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample allowing scientists to take a very small sample of DNA and amplify it to a large enough amount to study in detail.

It is very simple tests, very fast to produce and very fast to perform, yet ruling class does not want to scale them too soon as it will burst all narrative.

What you need?

Cotton stick aka test swab, properly disinfected. Cheap, widely available, nothing specific.

Test tubes, extremely cheap widely available in millions.

Primer - easy to produce thing, sequence is being generated by computer, big amounts of primers can be produced by primer machines in labs. Nothing new.

You put primer containing liquid in each test tume and put cotton stick in it (to say simple).

It is slight simplification as you can require also cheap standard RNA extraction, RNA-DNA transcriptize, but all is mass, quick and do not hold tests time.

Final thing - PCR machine, it is not super high end stuff, easy to scale production. Can process up to 96-362 tests at once (1-2 hours!)

All this is widely available in any good lab.

Yet ALL countries behave like stupid morons telling about tests shortage.

Why? I guess that they have some faked primers (to show that more people are sick from coronavirus instead of similar isssues) and hence require proper control and scaling that won't burst all thing on early stages. But may be not.

My optimistic version is still valid - http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/23720/coronavirus-optimistic-version-bureaucracy-suicide#Item_4

Issue is that almost all labs and specialists that can millions of tests do not have licenses and certificates to work with specific viruses and such, and no one want to provide them now to save their ass. i ti smuch safer for high ranked clerk to avoid any responsibility than to save lifes.