UW Medicine tests 2,000 COVID-19 kits per day. Here's how they did it.
By January, the University of Washington School of Medicine was eagerly waiting for the red tape to lift so it could begin testing for the novel coronavirus.
COVID-19, the respiratory infection caused by the coronavirus, had been quietly spreading throughout the Puget Sound region since then. But even before the first case, a Snohomish County man, was identified in the U.S. on Jan. 20, Alex Greninger, a board-certified clinical pathologist, knew he needed to engineer a test.
Greninger, assistant director of the clinical virology laboratories at UW School of Medicine, and Keith Jerome, head of the virology division, began developing a research test that would determine if a patient had COVID-19.
They had a working test in January, but couldn’t bring it to the clinic due to regulatory hoops. So, they tested research samples at random.
On Feb. 28, the day before the first death was announced in Kirkland, UW got a positive result.
Until that day, a Friday, there hadn’t been any known cases in Washington state outside of the Snohomish County man that had recovered earlier in the month. Suddenly there were three cases. The next day, a man in his 50s had died. By the end of the weekend, another person had died. Eight additional cases were confirmed, and a senior care facility in Kirkland had become the epicenter for the outbreak in the U.S.
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