On Feb. 29, 2020, the University of Washington (UW) Medicine Clinical Virology Lab announced it had received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permission to conduct coronavirus tests. By Mar. 2, the UW laboratory began processing 100 tests a day, and expected that 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.