Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today is Friday, December 11th.

Disney's stock is up, stimulus hopes are down, thanks to Mitch McConnell, and we're focused on the

past, present, and future of coronavirus testing. America right now is in the grips of the worst COVID-19 outbreak since the pandemic began.

More than 107,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with the virus.

And there have been more than 3,000 deaths in each of the past two days, which had never happened before.

And for context, more people

died yesterday from COVID-19 than died from the 9-11 terrorist attacks. And just think about

that for a minute. If you remember 9-11, think about how much death there was. We had that

yesterday. We'll have that today and likely tomorrow as well. They say it's always darkest before the dawn, and that might be what we're experiencing

with expectations that the FDA could approve Pfizer's vaccine any minute.

But the stark reality is that society will need to deal with COVID-19 even after vaccinations begin,

particularly given that the vaccines have only been shown to reduce

the risk of getting sick, not of transmitting the virus to others who haven't yet been vaccinated.

What that also means is that testing will continue to be a vital piece of the public health

and getting us back to school and work and life.

We've obviously come a long way from the

early days of testing when even finding a place to get one was tough and results could take up to a

week, but the volume of people getting tested remains extraordinarily high. LabCorp, for example,

says it's performing more than one million PCR tests per week. So we wanted to better understand the state of testing with LabCorp

CEO Adam Schechter and understand the stresses the system is under and where things go from here.

That conversation in 15 seconds.

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