Toward the end of february the cdc expanded the

Toward the end of February, the CDC expanded the testing criteria to include people who
were hospitalized with otherwise unexplained symptoms. On March 4, the governor announced
that the federal government would allow expansion of coronavirus testing, and public health
officials announced that all people at the care center where the first death occurred would be
tested (Gilbert and Gutman, 2020). Meanwhile, the University of Washington’s Virology Lab
developed its own diagnostic test (Sun, 2020).
On March 9, the governor announced requirements for screening visitors and employees at
the start of each shift as part of its restrictions for nursing homes and long-term care facilities,
and on March 10 the CDC conducted symptom screening in the nursing facility where the first
outbreak happened (Scott, 2020). Even with expanded testing criteria and with one of the first
nongovernmental laboratories approved to perform tests in the United States (Ghose, 2020a), the
number of tests performed was limited.
One of the persistent challenges was obtaining enough supplies to collect samples, namely,
testing swabs and viral transport media (Rasbach, 2020). There was a delay of up to a week in
test result turnaround in several commercial laboratories (KUOW Staff, 2020a). In mid-March,
the University of Washington expanded its drive-through testing to include first responders and
infected patients at its medical center (KUOW Staff, 2020b), and drive-through testing is
becoming more available in other communities (Bush, 2020).
The state recalled 12,000 test kits on April 18 that had been sent to local health jurisdictions,
tribal nations, and state agency partners, due to concerns about possible viral transport media
contamination (KUOW Staff, 2020a). On April 21, the University of Washington started the
daily processing of thousands of antibody tests made by Abbott Laboratories, Inc. (KUOW Staff,
2020a), which had produced no false positives as of April 17 (Scott, 2020). By the end of April,

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the state Department of Health expanded testing priority to those with symptoms recently
adopted by the CDC, such as shaking chills, muscle aches, and loss of taste or smell; included
mild symptoms; and recommended testing for a few high-risk groups including asymptomatic
people residing in congregate settings and others who had contact with confirmed COVID-19
patients (KUOW Staff, 2020c, 2020d).
As of May 13, the state Department of Health encourages testing even without symptoms
(Bush, 2020). However, it remains unclear whether people who die before testing will be tested
post-mortem.
As of May 11, 6.8 percent of all tests were positive (Evergreen Health, 2020). The negative
rate may vary between laboratories and may depend on the technique of using nasopharyngeal
swabs ( The Atlantic COVID Tracking Project, “Our Data,” 2020).
The state reports the number of people tested and reports the number of confirmed cases and
laboratory tests as of the previous day (Kirschman, 2020). An effort is then made by laboratories
and counties or the Department of Health to assign cases to specific counties, while the state