Inside the brick lab, Jerry Ritchey, a veterinary pathologist who was interim director at the time, was thinking about numbers. The tests would be run in the molecular diagnostics section headed by Ramachandran, which already had FDA-approved machines capable of running up to 2,000 coronavirus tests a day.
“Previously it was used for animals, and now it’s being used for a different kind of animal,” Ritchey said. “A coronavirus at the end of a nasal swab, it doesn’t really matter if it came from a cow, a pig or a person — it’s going to be tested the exact same way.”