Among its symptoms, COVID-19 is documented to dull the senses of taste and smell.
We didn't know at the start of this global pandemic.
But as much as we've learned though the intervening months, our memories of what the world was like before the virus may have dulled.
We know that now.
Welcome to Testing Our Limits, Abbott's video documentary series looking back at the earliest days of the novel coronavirus and hearing from those most closely involved in helping the company move quickly to meet the challenge of a growing pandemic.
Travel with us back to a time when acquiring samples was a Herculean challenge, when developing a reliable an assay from a single sequence took the best of our centuries of institutional knowledge, and when the idea of scaling up production in weeks meant starting with a clean sheet because institutional knowledge told you it was impossible. And impossible was not an option.
While it's just been months on the calendar, measured in COVID YEARS — like dog years — it feels like another age before COVID-19 captured the world's attention and fundamentally changed how we live.
In that time, Abbott has developed multiple tests and deployed them around the world by the tens of millions. The journey here started with one step. This is the story of that first test.
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