Nature reports:

Rohit Shankar left the virology laboratory at 2 a.m. on Wednesday, and was back at the lab bench by 7 a.m. the same day. “It’s okay,” he says, “I had a doughnut and a coffee.”

Shankar, a medical scientist, and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle are poised to exponentially drive up the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 around the city, in western Washington state. That’s because this week, they began analysing a mountain of nose and throat swabs collected from hospitals in the region. Already, the researchers are seeing clear signs that the virus has infected vastly more people than have been formally detected.

Washington state has become the United States’ ground zero for COVID-19, which has now spread to more than 90 countries worldwide in what seems to be a new and dangerous phase of the outbreak. Washington has declared a state emergency, and ten people there have died from the disease. But the number of confirmed cases in Washington — 70 — is still an underestimate resulting from a lack of testing, researchers agree. A genomic analysis posted online on 29 February suggested that hundreds of people in western Washington might already be infected. Academic scientists have mostly been prevented from measuring the extent of the US outbreak because of federal rules restricting the number of labs qualified to run diagnostic tests. But that is changing now, and helps account for why the state’s caseload jumped from 10 to 70 this week. [Continue reading…]