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.

Within 48 hours of receiving permission from the FDA to conduct tests on Feb. 29, the UW laboratory began processing 100 tests a day, and it expected to reach more than 1,000 a day. 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.

Researchers at sophisticated labs like UW’s are routinely able to produce diagnostic tests for viruses, but when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, patient tests were limited to those provided by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, after those tests proved to be faulty, there was a shortage of diagnostics needed for patients across the country.