At the height of the pan­dem­ic, when ven­dors were knock­ing down our door, we need­ed 10 Chris Kots.

Alas, there is only one, but with super­hu­man capacity.

Our eval­u­a­tion coor­di­na­tor iden­ti­fies and eval­u­ates new tech­nol­o­gy and pro­gress­es it to lab­o­ra­to­ry test­ing or clin­i­cal tri­al. But COVID-19 added a new dimen­sion to his work­ing life.

Since the pan­dem­ic began in 2020, he has eval­u­at­ed over 1500 poten­tial PoCT COVID-19 solutions.

These includ­ed assess­ing more than 35 rapid anti­gen test­ing (RAT) kits for suit­abil­i­ty to staff screen­ing, then re-eval­u­at­ing them to see which could detect COVID-19 variants.

It was Chris who saw COVID poten­tial in Roche’s Liat rapid test­ing plat­form. In 2021, 140 were brought online, per­form­ing 200,000 tests and pro­vid­ing results to clin­i­cians and pub­lic health teams with­in 30 minutes.

He led HealthShare’s eager­ly await­ed RAT ten­der, which chan­nelled com­pet­ing ven­dors into a com­pet­i­tive and appro­pri­ate selec­tion process, allow­ing NSW busi­ness­es to pro­cure kits with con­fi­dence. He led the schools’ RAT fea­si­bil­i­ty tri­al which informed roll­out strate­gies and the return-to-school policy.

He helped the Aus­tralia Gov­ern­ment with pol­i­cy devel­op­ment; NSW Gov­ern­ment agen­cies with sci­en­tif­ic advice and infor­ma­tion; and estab­lished and man­aged the New­cas­tle COVID-19 Rapid Test­ing Centre.

His eval­u­a­tion work, par­tic­u­lar­ly for COVID solu­tions was tru­ly inspir­ing. He would com­plete his nor­mal eval­u­a­tion work, return home to his young fam­i­ly for din­ner, then return to our John Hunter Hos­pi­tal lab­o­ra­to­ry to com­plete tech­nol­o­gy assess­ments and comparisons.

At no stage did Chris endan­ger him­self or the staff around him. He always wore per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment and used biosafe­ty cab­i­nets. Not once did he con­tract COVID-19.