UW Medicine: We've processed 400 tests for coronavirus so far -- and can handle 1,000 a day

The University of Washington School of Medicine says its virology lab is now capable of performing 1,000 genetic tests for the COV-19 coronavirus every day — but all that capacity hasn’t yet fully come into play.

If the coronavirus outbreak ramps up as projected, UW Medicine’s coronavirus test pipeline will ramp up as well.

“We’ve performed a little more than 400 tests to date over this week,” Alex Greninger, assistant director of UW Medicine Clinical Virology Laboratories, explained in an email forwarded to GeekWire. “We have much more capacity to perform tests than we are currently receiving. We perform tests on the specimens we are sent. Our current capacity in just over a thousand tests per day, and we are building out to perform 4,000 to 5,000 per day.”

Based on a survey of public health officials conducted by The Atlantic, that anticipated daily throughput is more than double the number of tests that have been conducted nationwide over the course of the past two months. The Atlantic reported that its tally came to 1,895 people tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive.