Attachment

Although the decision generated some blowback from government officials and the team had to temporarily stop testing the hospital samples, I felt (and still feel) that they did the right thing. The University of Washington review board that was overseeing the project came to the same conclusion, noting that the team's actions were the responsible and ethical thing to do. And state and federal officials continued to work with them on ways to study COVID in the area. In March 2020, the flu study group teamed up with the public health agency in King County, where Seattle is located, to create the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN. The pioneering system they had set up for gathering and processing flu samples and informing people of their results would be put to a new use: testing as many people for COVID as they could, mapping the results, and adding to the world's collection of genetic sequencing for this brand-new pathogen. SCAN's efforts got a huge lift from another group of local researchers. Working with some scientists at the Gates Foundation, this group persuaded government regulators that wiping a swab in the tip of a person's nose produced results that were just as good as the brain-tickling jab that other COVID tests required. That was a major advance, because it let people swab themselves, while the previous approach had to be handled by a health care worker. It was also much less uncomfortable, removing a barrier that had kept some people from getting tested. The old way inevitably made the test subject cough, which raised the odds of exposure for whoever was administering it, and the world was in the unprecedented situation of running out of the longer swabs. From March to May, things ran as smoothly as could be expected during a pandemic. The SCAN team collected samples from volunteers, told them whether they had COVID, started building a map of cases, and made sure the positive samples were sequenced. During that time,