At least in my country (PL), I was told the laboratory needs to be certified for work with infectious material at a certain standard (you don't want the virus t

At least in my country (PL), I was told the laboratory needs to be certified for work with infectious material at a certain standard (you don't want the virus to spread to the people running the test). So while most hospitals have a rt-pcr thermocycler, there are only a handful of labs equipped with personal protection systems for working with live viruses and having the established protocols to avoid sample contamination etc. I suppose some of those restrictions will be relaxed to include research labs when it's necessary to increase capacity. The test itself could be reliably run by any phd student or lab analyst.