Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q1 2020 LabCorp Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Clarissa Willett, Vice President of Investor Relations.
Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to Lastcorp's Q1 2020 conference call. As detailed in today's press release, there will be a replay of this call available via telephone and Internet. With me today are Adam Schechter, President and Chief Executive Officer and Glenn Eisenberg, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This morning, in the Investor Relations section of our website atlabcorp.com, we posted both our press release and an Investor Relations presentation with additional information on our business and operations, which include a reconciliation of the non GAAP financial measures to the GAAP financial measures discussed during today's call.
Additionally, we are making forward looking statements. These forward looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to expectations for 2020 and the related assumptions, including the projected impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on the company's businesses, operating results, cash flows and or financial condition, our responses to and the expected future impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic on our business more generally as well as on general economic, business and market conditions. Each of the forward looking statements is based upon current expectations and is subject to change based upon various factors, many of which are beyond our control that could affect our financial results. Some of these factors are set forth in detail in our most recent annual report on Form 10 ks and subsequent quarterly reports on Form 10 Q and in the company's other filings with the SEC. We have no obligation to provide any updates to these forward looking statements even if our expectations change.
Now, I'll turn the call over to Adam Schechter.
Thank you, Clarissa. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. These are certainly unprecedented times in which we've been living and working as a result of the global pandemic. Every country, government, customer, shareholder and employee has been impacted by these turbulent times and LabCorp is no exception. Given our unique role across the spectrum of diagnostic testing and drug development, we have risen to the challenge to help combat the virus.
We are supporting the detection of both those who are currently or previously infected by the virus and we are involved in the development of potential treatments and vaccines. Our teams, like many who are directly involved in fighting this pandemic, have been working around the clock, and they remain energized by all that we are doing to minimize the impact in the United States and around the world. I have been incredibly proud and impressed with how quickly and effectively we have mobilized our response. And I am confident that our company's mission to improve health and improve lives by delivering world class diagnostics, accelerating availability of innovative medicines and vaccines and using technology resonates even more in the most difficult of environments. In the Q1, we delivered solid performance across the company despite the challenges associated with COVID-nineteen, with 1st quarter revenue of $2,800,000,000 adjusted EPS of $2.37 and free cash flow of over $97,000,000 During the Q1, both diagnostics and drug development began experiencing the impact of the global pandemic with clients postponing programs and lower demand for diagnostic testing.
The increased testing we performed for COVID-nineteen did not nearly offset the decline in other testing. Diagnostics revenue declined 1.2% compared to a year ago due to lower organic revenue from the impact of COVID-nineteen and continued price pressures from PAMA. Drug Development revenue grew 6.4% from a year ago. Margins expanded 30 basis points and trailing 12 months book to bill remained strong at 1.26. The backlog remains unchanged from last quarter at $11,300,000,000 Given the significant uncertainty regarding the duration and the severity of the pandemic on a global basis, the company is withdrawing its 2020 financial guidance provided on February 13, 2020.
To protect our longer term prospects and to preserve jobs that we believe will be necessary in the future, we have taken a number of prudent steps to manage expenses as we make our way through these unusual times. Glenn will provide specifics of the expense actions in a moment, but importantly, we are not planning large scale employment reductions. Looking forward, despite the unpredictability of the pandemic, we believe that we are well positioned to continue to serve our customers and to drive long term shareholder value. My belief and what I continue to come back to as I assess our business now and for the future is this. The work we do was important before the crisis, and I believe it will be even more important as we move forward.
Just consider how we're making a difference during this time. We were the 1st commercial lab to launch PCR testing on March 5th, only 5 days after the FDA loosened rules around emergency use testing. PCR is a technology that LabCorp played essential roles in commercializing when it was first introduced nearly 30 years ago. So it is no surprise that we're able to mobilize quickly. Since that time working in close collaboration with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and with federal and state agencies across the United States, we have continued to apply our science at scale as we develop new methodologies to test more people and to test them faster.
To date, we've conducted over 1,000,000 COVID-nineteen tests and we're capable of performing more than 60,000 per day or 1,800,000 per month nationwide, and we continue to build additional capacity. In addition, we launched the LabCorp COVID-nineteen at home test collection kit on our Pixel by LabCorp platform. This is the 1st at home collection kit to receive FDA EUA approval and is currently available to healthcare workers and first responders who may have been exposed to COVID-nineteen or have symptoms consistent with the virus. We will roll out this at home collection more broadly in the coming weeks. We also launched serology testing, which helps to determine if an individual has had an immune response to the virus.
Currently, we can perform more than 50,000 serology tests per day, and we expect to perform more than 200,000 tests per day by mid May. This test will be available in our 2,000 patient service centers, including our 100 LabCorp at Walgreens sites and thousands of doctor offices across the country. At the same time, we've safely kept our routine and specialty diagnostics operations running and we continue to offer our usual test menu for patients who need diagnostic answers. That includes the critical services provided by our phlebotomists. We even made special hours available for our most vulnerable populations in our patient service centers.
Moving now to drug development. Our drug development business has benefited from our diagnostic testing and understanding of the virus, demonstrating once again the power of the combined capabilities. As you know, there are many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies that are working on potential treatments and vaccines for the virus. Our drug development teams are working around the world on these promising antivirals, other potential treatments and vaccines. In fact, we have mobilized a dedicated COVID-nineteen response team to help expedite treatments, enabling us to accelerate development and reach patients faster through a highly coordinated effort across diagnostics and drug development.
These teams have been highly successful in identifying and winning business, well above what our market share would imply. One example of how this team is quickly delivering value is through our collaboration with Ridback Biotherapeutics to test an antiviral drug. Less than 24 hours after receiving the MSRA clearance, the COVID's team began screening patients. 3 days later, on a public holiday, the first patient received the drug. We continue to use our scientific capabilities to make advancements that will help in the present, the near term and the future.
This includes advances such as launching a patient registry with Ciox Health that will enable researchers to better understand and characterize COVID-nineteen diagnosis and treatments and generate insights that will aid ongoing and future pandemic preparedness and prevention efforts. It also includes working with companies like Adaptive Biotechnologies and Microsoft to focus on immune response to the virus, where we have already recruited our first patient for this trial. And separately, we're working with Pacific Bioscience on unique programs that can shed light on virus characteristics that can support more informed patient treatment decisions. In conclusion, our commitment and our ability to support COVID-nineteen testing, treatments and vaccines as well as important scientific advances is unwavering and it will continue as we go into the future. Beyond our response to the pandemic, we will continue to move forward with our key priorities, which leverage the power of our uniquely combined capabilities across diagnostics and drug development.
The priorities remain to win in oncology, integrate data and analytics, AI and digitalization across our business, to put customers at the center of all we do, and to focus on high growth opportunities. We remain committed to beating the virus in the short term and to our long term strategy, which I'm even more convinced is the right path to grow and for success. Now I'll turn the call over to Glenn to discuss more specifically our financial performance.
Thank you, Adam. I'm going to start my comments by discussing the impact that the COVID-nineteen pandemic had on our business and then provide some details on our Q1 results. While we're not providing specific guidance today for the year, I'll provide some commentary on our current assumptions and expectations for the remainder of 2020. As Adam noted, our combined diagnostics and drug development offering uniquely enables us to help combat the global COVID-nineteen pandemic by supporting the detection of the virus through diagnostic testing as well as the development of treatments. While we continue to play a critical role in combating this pandemic, COVID-nineteen has had an adverse impact on the performance of both of our businesses, albeit at different magnitudes and in different ways.
In our Diagnostics business, at the end of the quarter, we experienced reductions in demand for testing of 50% to 55% versus the company's normal daily levels. This reduction in demand impacted testing volume broadly, but was more heavily weighted towards routine procedures. It also impacted esoteric tests, but to a lesser degree, due to the critical and time sensitive nature of these test results. In addition, while we ramped up capacity for COVID-nineteen tests, the impact of the new volume has only marginally offset the lower volume we're experiencing with our broader test offering. While not impacting the quarter, we're also focused on increasing capacity of our new COVID-nineteen serology antibody tests to over 200,000 per day by mid May, along with increasing capacity of our COVID-nineteen at home test kit offering.
In our drug development business, the COVID-nineteen impact started earlier than in our Diagnostics segment due to the more global nature of the business. However, while the impact has been less severe, the business has been impacted by customer initiated trial delays, limitations in access to certain trial sites and interruptions to the supply chain. Now review our Q1 performance. In our discussion, we will be breaking out the impact from COVID-nineteen given that the biggest impact was late in the quarter. Our expectation is that we will not be able to break out the impact in future quarters.
Revenue for the quarter was $2,800,000,000 an increase of 1.2% over last year, driven by the benefit of acquisitions net of divestitures 2.9%, partially offset by lower organic revenue of 1.8%. Organic revenue was negatively impacted by COVID-nineteen of approximately $137,000,000 or 4.9 percent, which includes $17,000,000 of increased accounts receivable reserves in our Diagnostics segment. The company increased its reserves as a result of rising unemployment and the financial difficulties faced by our customers in the wake of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Operating income for the quarter was a net loss of $193,000,000 compared to $318,000,000 last year. During the quarter, as a result of the ongoing COVID-nineteen pandemic and lower market valuations, we recorded impairments to goodwill and other assets totaling $437,000,000 or 3.7 percent of the company's total goodwill and intangible assets.
The impairment was primarily related to one reporting unit in our drug development business. In addition, we had $59,000,000 of restructuring charges and special items, primarily related to LaunchPad initiative and COVID-nineteen related charges. As a result, adjusted operating income, which excludes amortization of $62,000,000 as well as restructuring charges, special items and impairments, was $366,000,000 or 12.9 percent of revenue compared to $411,000,000 or 14.7 percent last year. The decrease in adjusted operating income and margin was due to the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of $72,000,000 Excluding the impact from COVID-nineteen, adjusted operating income and margins grew approximately $27,000,000 20 basis points, respectively. This increase benefited from LaunchPad savings and other top line growth, partially offset by PAMA and higher personnel costs, including one additional payroll day.
The tax rate for the quarter was negative 18.4% compared to 27% last year. The adjusted tax rate, excluding special charges, impairments and amortization, was 25.3% compared to 26.3% last year. The lower adjusted tax rate was primarily due to a higher percentage of the company's earnings coming from lower tax rate jurisdictions. Net earnings for the quarter were in a loss of $317,000,000 or a net loss of $3.27 per diluted share. Adjusted EPS were $2.37 in the quarter or $0.25 below last year due to the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of approximately $0.55 Operating cash flow was $204,000,000 in the quarter compared to $166,000,000 a year ago.
The increase in operating cash flow was due to favorable working capital, partially offset by lower cash earnings as a result of COVID-nineteen. Capital expenditures totaled $107,000,000 or 3.8 percent of revenue compared to $94,000,000 or 3.4 percent last year. As a result, free cash flow was $97,000,000 in the quarter compared to $72,000,000 last year. Early in the quarter, the company repurchased $100,000,000 of its stock. However, we have since suspended our share repurchase program given the uncertainty of the COVID-nineteen pandemic as well as we focus on liquidity and financial flexibility.
At quarter end, our cash balance was $324,000,000 down from $338,000,000 at the end of 2019. Total debt at quarter end was $6,200,000,000 and our leverage was 3.2 times gross debt to last 12 months EBITDA. Now I'll review our segment performance beginning with LabCorp Diagnostics. Revenue for the quarter adjusting out the $17,000,000 increase in accounts receivable reserves as a result of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, was $1,700,000,000 a decrease of 1.2% compared to last year. The decrease was due to lower organic revenue of 2.9%, partially offset by the benefit of acquisitions of 1.7%.
Excluding the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of $93,000,000 PAMA of $20,000,000 and the positive impact of an additional one half revenue day of $12,000,000 organic revenue grew approximately 3%. In addition, the impact from the non renewal of the Beacon LVS UnitedHealthcare contract was largely offset by the benefit of weather. Total volume decreased by 4.4% compared to last year as acquisitions contributed 1.6%, while organic volume decreased 6.1%. The decline in organic volume was due to a net reduction in demand from COVID-nineteen of 7.3%, partially offset by other organic volume growth of 1.2 percent. The reduction in demand impacted testing volume broadly, but was heavily weighted towards routine procedures.
Also, the benefit from an additional one half revenue day and favorable weather versus the prior year was essentially offset by the negative impact from lower consumer genetics demand of 1.6%. As a reminder, we do not include hospital lab management agreements in our volume, which would have added approximately 0.6% to our volume growth. Revenue per acquisition increased by 3.4%. The increase was due to favorable mix, which includes the impact from COVID-nineteen of 1.9%, consumer genetics of 0.9%, other organic growth of 2.8%, partially offset by PAMA of 1.1% and the non renewal of the Beacon LBS contract of 1.1 percent. LabCorp Diagnostics adjusted operating income for the quarter was $254,000,000 or 14.9 percent of revenue compared to $310,000,000 or 18 percent last year.
The decline in adjusted operating income and margin was primarily due to the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of $62,000,000 PAMA of $20,000,000 and higher personnel costs, partially offset by LaunchPad savings and other organic growth. Excluding the negative impact from COVID-nineteen and PAMA, adjusted operating income and margins grew approximately 26,000,000 and 70 basis points, respectively. We remain on track to deliver $200,000,000 of net savings by the end of 2021 from our Diagnostics LaunchPad initiative. Now I'll review the performance of Covance Drug Development. Revenue for the quarter was $1,100,000,000 an increase of 6.4% compared to last year due to
the benefit of
acquisitions net of divestitures of 4.9 percent and organic growth of 1.6%, partially offset by foreign currency translation of 10 basis points. Excluding the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of approximately $27,000,000 organic revenue grew approximately 4.1%. Adjusted operating income for the segment was $151,000,000 or 13.2 percent of revenue compared to $138,000,000 or 12.8 percent last year. The increase in adjusted operating income and margin was primarily due to organic demand, acquisitions, net of divestitures and LaunchPad savings, partially offset by higher personnel costs and the negative impact from COVID-nineteen of $12,000,000 Excluding the impact from COVID-nineteen, adjusted operating income and margins grew approximately $25,000,000 120 basis points, respectively. We remain on track to deliver $150,000,000 of net savings by the end of this year from Drug Development's LaunchPad initiative.
For the trailing 12 months, net orders and net book to bill remained strong at $5,800,000,000 and $1,260,000,000 respectively. Backlog at the end of the quarter was $11,300,000,000 We expect approximately $3,900,000,000 of this backlog to convert into revenue over the next 12 months. Now I'll provide some commentary for the remainder of 2020. As we announced this morning in our earnings press release, due to the unpredictability regarding the duration and impact of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, we have withdrawn our full year 2020 guidance. Especially during times like these, the strength and power of our combined diagnostics and drug development business is evident both from a strategic as well as financial standpoint.
Given the current environment, we continue to adjust our operations and manage costs, while still investing in the company to achieve the best long term outcome for our customers, employees and shareholders. While revenues and earnings are expected to be down in 2020, we still expect to generate both solid earnings and free cash flow. Some of the actions we are taking to help mitigate the impact of COVID-nineteen include furloughs, delaying hiring, reducing temporary and contract workers or limiting hours where demand for our services is soft, suspension of discretionary merit adjustments and 401 plan contributions. In addition, the company's cash flow for the year is expected to include government related actions such as the deferral of payroll tax payments, the upcoming benefit from the suspension of sequestration and the CARES Act from which we received $56,000,000 which will help support the increased spend related to ramping up testing capacity to address the COVID-nineteen pandemic. From a capital allocation standpoint, we will continue to make internal investments to support long term growth and profitability.
However, even after the increased spend to develop and expand test capacity for the molecular COVID-nineteen and serology tests, we expect our capital spend to be less this year than last year. Similarly, we will continue to evaluate acquisition opportunities but with a heightened threshold as we focus on liquidity. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, we have suspended our share repurchase program for the foreseeable future. Our investment grade philosophy has served us well in these challenging times. From a liquidity standpoint, on top of the strong free cash flow we expect to generate this year, as of March 31, we had $324,000,000 of cash on hand and $924,000,000 of available credit for our $1,000,000,000 revolving credit facility that matures in 2022.
The only debt we have due this year is $412,000,000 of notes maturing in November that we expect to pay down using free cash flow. However, we may opt to refinance these notes in the public bond market depending upon our needs. As I mentioned earlier, our leverage at the end of the quarter was 3.2x gross debt to last 12 months EBITDA within our 4x debt covenant. While we currently expect to be within our covenant throughout the year, we have had discussions with our banks to add future flexibility to this covenant given the uncertainty related to COVID-nineteen. We continue to actively monitor the evolving COVID-nineteen pandemic and we'll provide updates as appropriate.
And this concludes our formal remarks and we'll now take questions. Operator?
Thank you, sir. I show our first question comes from Lisa Gill from JPMorgan. Please go ahead.
Good morning and thanks very much. Adam, thank you for all that your team is doing on the front lines of these difficult times. I just really want to understand just a couple of things. As we think about the testing volume for both COVID-nineteen as well as serology, can you first talk about expectations around reimbursement? And then secondly, I know that you pulled guidance, but with the anticipation of 200,000 serology tests a day, how many tests do you expect that you can get on the molecular side?
And do you think I know you said you expected the numbers to be down this year, but is there an anticipation that potentially this testing volume could help to offset some of what you're seeing as far as traditional volumes? And then just lastly, like when we think about volumes going into the back half of the year, what are your expectations around kind of getting back to more normalization? Will that happen potentially by the time we get to the 3rd or 4th quarter? I know that's a lot of questions in one, but I just wanted to try to understand how
we think about these volumes.
Yes, sure. Good morning, Lisa. And I'll start off by saying, I've been involved with LabCorp now for 6 years, and I began as CEO in November. And when an organization is pushed to the limits, you really learn a lot about the organization. And the people at LabCorp work so hard and are doing so much and care about their work in a remarkable way.
And just you can get to see the heart and the soul of an organization. And what I've seen is just amazing. And I'm just very impressed with the people that I'm working with, the scientists, the frontline workers, the phlebotomists, the couriers, the people that are building our capacity have just been outstanding. So I'm just it's a pleasure for me to be able to work with such great people. With regard to the testing, let me try to give you some background of where we are and where I see things going.
So it was just about 45 days ago that we began testing and we're able to do several 1,000 tests a day. I'm talking PCR testing first. I'll get to serology in a moment. And we're going to continue to build that capacity. I don't know the exact number that we'll be able to build to and how fast, but I would like to get over 100,000 tests per day as quickly as possible.
The issue that you run through is you need additional machines and you can imagine there's lots of back orders and doing these RNA tests and the PCR test takes a lot of equipment. But we're going to try to build to get to over 100,000 as quickly as we can. The interesting thing is for a short period of time when we're doing 1,000 a day, we did have some back orders for several weeks. We no longer have any back orders. And in fact, we have some additional capacity.
So we're not using all of our capacity at the 60,000 per day right now. I think that's just short term. And I think as states become up and running and back to business, I think that we will be at full capacity in the very near future, which is why we're trying to build more and more capacity as quickly as we can. So I believe that the PCR testing will be running at capacity for quite some time. With regard to serology, it's still very early and it's not easy to predict.
I think there's still some debate frankly in the marketplace on how to utilize the serology tests and the way in which to go about using serology. Right now, we can go over 50,000 serology tests a day, but we'll be able to do well over 200,000 a day by the middle of next month. I don't know how long it will take though in order for us to use all of that capacity per day. And I think that there's several reasons why. One is as companies, particularly large companies are coming back to work, some of them are talking about serology tests doing them on large scale.
Some of them are saying they don't see the need. In addition to that, I believe there will be other ways such as point of care serology tests, and I don't know how they're going to be used in the marketplace. My expectation is that we'll be able to use most of our serology capacity as we get in through the summer months and into the fall. And I just don't know how quickly that will ramp up, but I think we'll be able to find ways to appropriately utilize most of the serology testing as we move forward through the summer. With regard to that though, when you think about those numbers, over 200,000 tests a day in serology and maybe 100,000 tests over time for PCR, it's still a very small number compared to the 530,000,000 or so tests that we do a year across all of our testing.
So unless we start to see that come back, it will be hard for these tests to make up for the difference in what we've seen at the last weeks of March. Now the good news is we are starting to see a little bit less of a decline as we go towards the end of this month. And as the country gets back up and running, I would expect we'll start to see less of a decline over the summer. And assuming that there's no additional impact in the fall of this year with another impact from the COVID-nineteen virus, I would expect that as we get towards the end of the year, a lot of the volume will come back. And I always come back to the fact that what we did before was important for health.
I worry right now that a lot of people that need diagnostic testing are not getting what they need. Once they feel comfortable again to go outside of their home, I believe they will start to go back for their diagnostic testing like they have in the past. Hopefully, I've answered your questions, Lisa. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Ralph Giacobbe from Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks. I just want to continue on the serology testing. I mean, do you have any expectation of pricing at this point and timing of when CMS is going to release the rate? And then is your expectation that commercial rates are going to mirror those for serology and have insurers come up and match the $100 molecular test? Thanks.
Yes. So let me start off with the molecular testing. So molecular test, the reimbursed rate by Medicare is about is $100 and that's what we charge all customers, dollars 100 We're trying to in this pandemic and time of being, we're looking for consistency and we're charging a consistent price across the marketplace. We don't have a Medicare price yet for the serology testing. I'm not saying for certainty that that will be our price that we charge to all customers.
But if you look at what we've done with the PCR testing, that's something that I'll be looking at very, very closely. Again, I want to make sure that we're seen as doing everything we can in this pandemic to help in every way which we can. And I think that we should know something hopefully in the next days, certainly not more than a week or so I would expect.
Thank you. I show our next question comes from Kevin Caiambo from UBS. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning. I'd like to talk a little bit about the CRO. If you've seen any cancellations yet and anything and how the three segments are performing from a demand and disruption standpoint, the level of work that you can continue, any sort of visibility around that or if you can break it down by the 3 CRO segment and maybe when you expect to get some activity ramping back up as the year progresses?
Sure. Good morning, Kevin. So a couple of things. First of all, with regard to cancellations in the Q1, we saw about the same number of cancellations that we would expect to see in any quarter. So we didn't see an acceleration of cancellations.
With regard to the overall CRO business, we continue to have growth despite COVID-nineteen in the Q1. But obviously, towards the end of quarter, we start to see a significant impact from people postponing trials. Interestingly, that business started to be impacted a little bit earlier than the end of March because we do have a central laboratory business in China. The impact there was earlier than the United States. And we've actually seen our business in China start to pick up as China has begun to open up.
But when I look at more than the segments and the timing of them coming back because they will come back is what's happening in the marketplace right now. And I mentioned that if you look at the COVID-nineteen trials, whether it be for vaccines, whether it be central laboratory work or be early stage development for antivirals, we are winning more than our share would predict. In fact, almost twice the amount of studies as a percent than what you would have expected based upon our share. I think that truly demonstrates the power of the combined. When I watch what our teams are doing and our diagnostic teams are joining our drug development team in conversations with clients.
And even with our diagnostic teams, our drug development teams are coming into the diagnostic discussions to help understand what is being done in the marketplace and the studies that are underway. We are really starting to see significant advantage of having both the diagnostics and drug development business. Now most of the trials are preclinical or Phase 1. Even there, we're winning more than our fair share of market. But what I want to see is as those vaccines and those antivirals go into Phase 2 and Phase 3 that we continue to win above what our market share would suggest.
So I'm excited about the long term prospects for certain. I'm seeing the power combined. How quickly the business comes back is going to be determined to some extent how quickly markets around the world open up, particularly for the Phase III clinical trials because most of those are global clinical trials. But I would say that we're optimistic that the world needed what we did before this. And certainly with what's happening today in the trials for COVID-nineteen, I think our capabilities are needed even more so in the future.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next
volume growth trend in the quarter in your lab business and the disparity versus your large competitor. Can you comment on maybe any share dynamics in the quarter? And were there any lingering headwinds from the expanded managed care access for your competitor? Or has that all annualized at this point? Thank you.
Yes. I'll give some context and I'll ask Glenn if he wants to jump in. But basically you saw our decline of between 50% to 55% towards the end of the quarter in terms of volume in the last several weeks of March. And we've seen that kind of level off. And I'd say in the last couple of weeks, we've actually seen it begin to come back a little bit.
We saw a little bit of a change in mix as well that the esoteric testing did not decline as fast as the overall testing did. And that's not a surprise because esoteric testing typically is more severe diseases and so forth. That's a little bit why you saw an increase in our average price for the quarter. It's because the esoteric business held a bit stronger than the typical regular diagnostic business. But as we go forward, we would expect both businesses to begin to pick up and assuming that the country begins to come back to work and as we get through the summer, there's no additional impact in the fall season, I would expect both esoteric and the other diagnostic tests to come back to somewhat normal as we get through the end of the year.
Yes. Dan,
I guess just to add to when you look at our normalized level of organic volume, it was pretty consistent with where we've been at roughly around 1.3% when you take out the unusuals, if you will. So as Adam said, obviously, backing out the impact of COVID, which we said was around 7.3% impact. Then we had 3 other kind of discrete items, 2 that were positive. So we benefited from the half of revenue day and that was around 0.7% benefit to our volume growth. And then we had favorable weather compared to a year ago of around 0.8%, but that was offset effectively by lower consumer genetics demand of 1 point 6%.
So effectively, a 1.3% for us has been kind of where we've tracked and obviously improved over the Q4, but kind of where we would expect to track. And I know you mentioned our competitor. We do talk about that we do treat the treatment of volume differently for our lab management fees, which would have added around 60 basis points. So we feel really good that the base business from a demand standpoint, a volume standpoint has been pretty consistent. What we've also been very pleased about and really impacts our revenues even more is on the price side.
And while overall our pricing, we would say, is relatively flat, the mix impact really was nice. So again, in a similar vein, while we show kind of organic pricing at around a 3.4% increase, we had a couple of headwinds and tailwinds. We benefit from, as Adam said, from COVID, where we have lower percentage impacted from the esoteric tests, so it mixes us up. That helped us around 1.9%. Similarly, with lower consumer demand, consumer genetics demand at a lower price point, that helped our mix at 0.9.
Percent. And then the headwinds we talked about already of PAMA and Beacon each at around 1.1 percent. So again, getting to a normalized price would get us to around price mix of 2.8%, which actually has tracked higher than what we've done the past year, in line, call it, with the last couple of quarters where we've been north of 2, but we continue to see favorable price mix. So from a revenue standpoint, again, excluding COVID, we felt we had actually a very strong quarter.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Derik De Bruin from BOA. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking the question. So I just wanted to go back on the testing side for COVID. So we've seen estimates of anywhere from the need for 500,000 molecular test day and up on that one. I'm just sort of curious in terms of what sort of capacity expectations or need expectations you're planning for and you're looking for and sort of how you think about that.
And this sort of goes into a question about your ultimate share and where you think it is. So the first part of that question is one on what you think the ultimate testing need will be and how long the duration of that is? And the follow-up on that one is going to be something similar for serology. I mean, there's clearly a lot more serology capacity in the U. S.
Than there is molecular. And I'm just sort of curious on how you sort of see demand for that market evolving going forward, just given there are so many more players that can do serology testing? Thank you.
Yes. Hi, Derek. A couple of thoughts. First of all, if you look at overall capacity needed for PCR testing, which is testing to tell if a person actually has the virus, is actively shedding the virus, It's impossible to know the exact number that you need across the United States. I would say right now, if you look at what's been done over 5,000,000 tests, that's pretty significant.
I just said that we could do today 1,800,000 tests per month, and we're going to try to increase that. If we can get 100,000 tests or greater a day, alone, we could do 2,500,000 per month. And then you would add in all the other commercial labs, the state labs, the local labs, the academic medical centers. I think there's going to be a very significant amount of capacity that at least will get people through stage 1 of what the White House coronavirus task force is recommending to get states up and running. At the same time, we're going to all continue to build capacity because until there's a vaccine, I think we're going to have to have the ability to continue to do testing to see who has the virus.
And I think that type of testing will continue even when there is a treatment up until there is a vaccine. Separate and distinct from that is the serology, which is to tell who has been exposed to the virus in the past. And scientifically, frankly, there's still a lot of discussion on what's the most appropriate way to use the serology testing. For surveillance, I think it's going to be used for a long time. I also believe that as businesses get up and running, they're going to test large parts of the population for serology tests.
And I believe if somebody tests positive for serology, meaning if they've been exposed to virus in the past, they'll probably need a second test in order to validate that it wasn't a false positive. And then the question becomes how often is somebody who's negative to serology get tested? Is it every 3 months? Is it every 6 months? And I don't think that there's any known recommendation at this time.
The good news for us for serology is it's a blood test and we run blood tests all the time. We know how to run blood tests And we're going to build as much capacity as we can. We'll utilize as much of that capacity as we can. But at the same time, a lot of those will be run on the machines that we run our typical blood tests on anyway. So I think for us, it's a matter of build as much as you can, see how the science plays out, see how the marketplace plays out and just be prepared for whatever volume we may need.
Thank you.
Sure.
Our next question comes from Erin Wright from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Great, thanks.
I have a couple
of questions on Covance. Do you I guess, what percentage of the sites would you consider offline or inaccessible right now? And what percentage of that clinical trial work do you And then, a second part to that would be, how And then, a second part to that would be how many of these COVID-nineteen trials have you won? And do you anticipate those trials to actually be material from a financial perspective? Others, I guess, in the industry have downplayed contribution from those COVID trials?
Thanks.
Yes. Okay. Aaron, I'm going to start with your last question first and I'll answer the other ones. So first of all, if you look at the COVID-nineteen trials, whether they be for antivirals, whether they be the things that we're doing with a company like PacBio or Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, most of them are early stage smaller trials. So we're winning, I said, more than twice our market share would expect us to win, but they're still relatively small child.
They're early stage, preclinical or Phase 1. As those progress, I would expect that we would win more than our fair share in Phase 2 and 3, and then I believe they become much more meaningful in terms of dollars. Right now, they're meaningful because it really is demonstrating the power of having a diagnostic capability combined with drug development capability. Something distinct from that with regard to sites up and running, we think it's that about 70% to 80% of sites are not up and running at the moment for clinical trials. At the same time, we're working hard because we have made significant advances in hybrid and virtual clinical trials.
And I think as the trials come back, there'll be even greater utilization for things like hybrid and virtual trials. So we'll continue to work with our pharmaceutical and biotechnology colleagues to help them get their trials up and running as quickly as possible.
Thank Our next question comes from Ricky Goldwasser from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning and thank you for all the details. Question on reimbursement of the PCR, obviously CMS raised reimbursement for $51 to $100 But what are your thoughts as testing expands and we shift to Phase II and Phase III? Do you anticipate the reimbursement is going to stay at those levels or as volumes pick up and the testing guidance has relaxed that we're going to see changes to the price metric?
So thank you for the question, Ricky. And right now, the Medicare price is $100 and that's been our price and our philosophy on pricing, which is to use the Medicare price, which they take a lot of time, spend a lot of effort to think through what is appropriate. And therefore, we've charged all customers at that price. I have no reason to believe that that price would change based upon anything I know today. And I think that the testing for PCR will continue to grow, but the importance of it, it makes it very cost effective to test patients and actually find out who has the disease and then isolate them so others don't get the disease.
So I think it's a very cost effective way in order to ensure that you do everything you can. At the same time, I would say that the capital expense and the difficulty of PCR is pretty high and doing the PCR testing is not simple. I mean it's an RNA extraction that has multiple steps. So I feel like the reimbursement where it is today is at a good rate.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Stephen Baxter from Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning and thanks for all the color you guys provided today. I was hoping to get a little more insight into the increase in accounts receivable allowance that you guys mentioned during prepared remarks. Have you started to actually see anything yet in terms of your ability to collect on co pays and deductibles in the lab side of the business? And just in terms of what this charge actually represents, is this covering Q1 dates of service, some wider range of time? And then how are you thinking or expecting this to play out kind of throughout the balance of the year?
And is this going to be an item that you continue to exclude from earnings for the balance of the year? Thank you.
Yes. No, this is Glenn. I'd say, as we looked at our reserves for receivables, we looked obviously back at prior recessions and big events that occurred. And needless to say, with the high unemployment rates, the impact that it's having on our customers, if you will, our expectation is that business that we've already conducted that we currently have as receivables outstanding, we've assessed that full amount and have taken kind of a onetime charge or onetime reserve relative to those receivables. We'll obviously still look to go and collect on them.
But based upon historical experiences, we feel that's an appropriate level to build the reserve for that. So as we go forward, we have a normal standard adequacy of all of our reserves. So at this point, we would say we're fully reserved based upon what we believe. And then if anything changes in the future, we'll adjust that. But our expectation is that the reserves that we established are not adequate to deal with the environment that we're operating in.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Matt Larew from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. This is Dan Lawler on for Matt Larew. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the initial demand that you're seeing for your at home COVID tests and whether or not you think COVID-nineteen could be a catalyst for you to ramp up Pixel over the long term? Thanks.
Yes. Hi, Dan. Thanks for the message. And we announced the launch of our Pixel by LabCorp at home test for COVID-nineteen about a week ago. And we're focused right now on frontline healthcare workers and first responders that have symptoms.
And we've seen the demand is pretty significant in terms of not only people that are going to our website, but other people that are trying to reach out and see when it will be available more broadly to additional people outside of those subgroups. So I do believe that this may be a reason that Pixel continues to grow over time as we go into the future. At the same time, we do plan to launch Pixel to additional groups of people as we get through the next weeks. And I would expect right now we have over 100,000 kits available that will continue to make that much as we look out into the future on a weekly to other every other week basis. Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Polark from Baird. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to get a bit more detail on the goodwill impairment. Glenn, I think you mentioned it relates predominantly to one of the reporting units in drug development. What piece of the Covance business took the impairment?
And I guess more context around why a lot of companies are viewing the COVID disruption as a transitory influence. So I was a little surprised to see a permanent impairment charge taken. Any color on this topic would be helpful.
Sure, Michael. It is kind of an interesting exercise given that these are point in time. So as you recall in our 10 ks, we commented that we did have one of the reporting units within drug development that was relatively close fair value versus the book value. And that was performed as we do all of our reporting units at the based upon September 30 and we report out on it for the year. But when we bring it to our kind of outside firm that does our valuations, it's based upon a point in time.
And so what's interesting that's happened is now we move forward to March 31, where we've now done it again. And obviously, the business has been impacted by COVID as a lot of others, but we look at the valuations or they look at valuations based upon DCFs as well as just market valuations. And so interestingly, when you look at the CRO market multiples from September 30 through March 30, they're down 30%. And so we're effectively half of the valuation is saying the value of the business is down 30%. As that one point in time, frankly, if we were to do it today, it would be a very different number, but accounting says you do it on that date.
And then also given the volatility in the market, you have the discount rate that was increased. So from their exercise on a value of a business on a particular day, that caused the decline of which we took the non cash charge during the quarter.
Would you say it's equally spread across lab clinical early? Or was this related predominantly by Chiltern or Envigo or anything else that you could specifically call out?
Sure. Effectively, we have a lot of different reporting units, but the one reporting unit here that's broken out primarily relates to our clinical business. So that's the reporting unit separate. And as you know, when you look at even an acquisition and you break out the pieces to it, it doesn't necessarily say it's reflective of the total valuation of a company. It's just the specific reporting unit that's broken out as well as the specific goodwill that's allocated to that business at that point in time.
And so to your point, you could say that within a year ago, you acquired a business and you paid the market multiple for that business at that time. Now all of a sudden, you see a 30% correction. That business that you just bought is now theoretically worth 30% less. And an accounting would say that's what you evaluate at that day. And then 6 months later, you could be back up to that same market multiple.
The valuation goes back up, but you don't write it back up. It's just the convention. So it's just a confluence of events with COVID-nineteen impacting earnings, results of all the companies as well as the market valuations resulted in the impairment charge.
And the only thing I would add is strategically, there is no doubt in my mind, and we are seeing more and more evidence every day, particularly as we go through the COVID-nineteen pandemic, having the drug development business together with the diagnostic business was a great strategic move. And I believe in the importance of the combined today as much if not more based upon what we're going from, what we're seeing than I did even before the virus.
I appreciate all that color. If I could sneak one more in on the CARES Act, the $56,000,000 that you received, I presume in April, will you carve that out of adjusted earnings for future reporting, just a housekeeping item? And then, do you expect any additional disbursements under the CARES Act? I know there was a second round of payments expected here in the very near term. Anything else you might anticipate to receive?
Yes. I'd say, obviously, how we'll account for it, we'll determine as we go through the quarter and report. I think it's fair to say, given we've even done it now, anything that is unusual, we will either call out separately or at least explain that the performance benefited from that. But clearly, that's to some extent a recoup, if you will, of the negative impact that we're being impacted by COVID as well as the capital spend and other spend that we're making in order to ramp up our testing as well. And while there are other tranches of the CARES Act that we could potentially be included in at this stage.
It's just too early to tell what that would be. And obviously, once we have more clarity on that, we'll be able to convey that.
Okay. So first of all, thank you everybody for joining us today. And I have to say, I am so proud of the way our company has mobilized to serve patients, customers, our local communities and the world. LabCorp has been innovators in science and medicine to help address global needs, and I am deeply grateful for the way in which our 65,000 employees have stepped up in every country around the world. What we do matters, and I believe it matters more in the future than it did
in the past, and I believe
it mattered a lot in the past. The challenge is far from over, but as I said previously, I have no doubt that we can beat this virus and also that LabCorp will remain committed to our mission to improve health and improve lives as we move forward. So thank you so much for joining the call today.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.