The Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory now tests hundreds of patient samples each day from around the Bay Area and beyond for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe.

Within the next week, the lab hopes to be able to conduct more than 1,000 tests per day. Results are typically delivered within 36-48 hours.

“We are tapping into the rich resources of Stanford University and Stanford Health Care to scale up our capacity as quickly as possible to provide the tests that clinicians need to care for their patients,” said lab medical director Benjamin Pinsky, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and of infectious diseases at the School of Medicine.

As of March 16, there were 4,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and more than 179,000 cases globally. More than 7,000 people worldwide have died from the disease, which causes mild to severe respiratory illness. The disease is particularly dangerous for elderly people and those with pre-existing health conditions, including heart disease, diabetes and lung disease.

The Clinical Virology Laboratory is providing testing services not just to Stanford Health Care, but also to several hospitals in the Bay Area. A drive-through testing site also has been established at Stanford Health Care’s same-day primary care clinic in Palo Alto.

More testing needed

More testing is needed to identify people infected with the coronavirus and their close contacts who may be infected but are not yet experiencing symptoms. Quarantining exposed people before they infect others is an important way to slow the spread of the disease, which is transmitted through the air via respiratory secretions when infected people cough or sneeze.

On Feb. 29, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing the restrictions on the use of diagnostic tests developed by laboratories in the United States for COVID-19. Prior to the announcement, doctors had to rely on public health laboratories or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to test samples from patients — a process that could mean several days before learning the results.