CALMATTERS - California still does not have enough capacity to test for coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Sunday, despite furious efforts by private, university and government laboratories to scale up to handle thousands of more patients.
“The PCR is the really easy part,” said Frances Sladek, a professor of cell biology and toxicology as well as the divisional dean of life sciences at UC Riverside. Freshmen who have never touched scientific instruments learn in a lab course how to run PCR well enough to identify species of fish from the filets at a store, Sladek said. That’s why it’s so incomprehensible to her, she said, “that there’s any problem at all with this.”