Closing Thoughts and a Path Forward
The COVID-19 outbreak has once again highlighted the need to create a robust and sustainable system allowing for rapid development, dissemination, and implementation of diagnostic tests targeted against infectious diseases of global health concern. To provide healthcare providers with the answers they need to make critical patient-management decisions, rapid testing for the outbreak-associated pathogen is needed. This will require us to think creatively, so that testing for novel and emerging pathogens can be implemented in both public health laboratories and clinical laboratories in a timely fashion. To accomplish this goal, there will be substantial logistical challenges and resource limitations to overcome. However, this is certainly a challenge worth taking on, and one in which we can be successful by working together.