Thank you for the question.
I will do my very best to respond to it, not being a laboratory medicine specialist myself.
The short version of the story is that you have a new virus. This is a virus that was only identified about a month ago. In the world of lab medicine, and microbiology in particular, they're very precise. They're scientists. We have a test here in Ontario that's conducted by the provincial lab, the Public Health Ontario laboratory. The fact that the virus was identified only a month ago and that we have a test is a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself. That's not unique to us. There are other labs around the world that have this.
Effectively, what happens is that the tests are conducted on the patients here. The results go to the provincial lab. It gives us what's called a “presumptive confirmed” test because it's a first test. If the test indicates the presence of the virus, it's positive. Because we're talking about a newly identified virus, a second test needs to be conducted. It is a different test, but it also tests for the presence of the virus, and that test is done at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg.
Because you have a new virus and a new entity, you need two tests in order to precisely identify and confirm that it is a positive test for this new coronavirus.