COVID testing at National Jewish Health

On Sunday March 22, 2020, we went live with our first COVID test. It was clunky and slow, but on Sunday evening we got our first results. We had dusted off some old equipment, validated the new 2019-nCoV test that the CDC had described, and were one of the first hospitals in Denver to bring up a test. It was tiring, nerve-racking, exhilarating and rewarding. After that, we didn't look back. We trained more people so that we could run the test more often and developed priority lanes to make sure the sickest patients - even if they weren't from our own hospital - could get tested as soon as possible. We soon realized, though, that our supply chain kept breaking and we ran into bottlenecks. So we validated reagent after reagent in order to build in redundancy. Most labs will validate one or two new assays a year - we performed about fifteen in a matter of months. 

Finally, after weeks of follow-up with various manufacturers, we got our hands on some new instruments. This changed everything. Once we validated new assays on these instruments, we could suddenly run hundreds of tests a day. We built some models to show the C-suite what we needed to do to scale even more and were able to get yet more instruments - but more importantly - more people. At one point, we had 80 people in a new virology lab that had not existed just a few months before, and we had built a giant system that was working all days a week, all hours of the day. At our height, we were running 3,000 tests a day. Of course, we soon realized we could do better and started automating with robots. That helped us extend our reach further so that we could help support public health labs too, like those in New Mexico, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming. 

Lab meetings outside. Our lab was one of the few parts of the hospital that was still functional

Training on CAPRs

Thank-you-doughnuts from St. Joseph's hospital who had to use us for COVID testing because they could not bring up an assay as fast as this team

 

National Jewish Trailers were popped up to collect samples for COVID testing