On Mar. 4, 2020, the UW Medicine Clinical Virology Lab announced it had received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permission to deploy a new test for coronavirus. The UW began testing hundreds of patient samples each day to detect the coronavirus, helping to break a logjam in diagnostic testing amid a serious outbreak in the Seattle region.

Long-established and certified to conduct complex tests for microbes, the lab eventually could have the capacity to screen up to 5,000 samples per day, a process that takes about eight hours for each sample.