A lab technician looks hard at a 7-cm-tall resinous container, opens the lid ever so carefully and sucks up a liquid with a syringe. Then, 0.1 milliliter of the liquid is placed in a different container, mixed with a reagent. If even a tiny amount of the new coronavirus that could be contained in the sample enters the body, one can get infected.
Lab technicians at Gifu Prefectural Research Institute for Health and Environmental Sciences in the city of Kakamigahara, Gifu Prefecture, who are on the front line of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing in the prefecture, have to keep on concentrating for hours, processing 20 samples per person in three hours.
Samples taken from people suspected of being infected with COVID-19 are carried into the institute and are tested inside a biosafety level 3 high-containment laboratory.
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