The ability to quickly confirm or clear suspected cases is crucial during global outbreak scenarios, especially when clinical manifestations are difficult to distinguish from other respiratory infections such as influenza, molecular diagnostics is key for detection of the emerging virus. A variety of suitable assays were made available early on during the course of the outbreak, notably by Corman et al. and others [4,5]. However, their implementation in the diagnostics laboratory usually relies on manual PCR setups requiring a high degree of human interaction for execution and interpretation, thus limiting their capacity to be scaled up for handling large numbers of samples.