UC Davis Health Pathology-Laboratory Medicine Team Started From Scratch
by Lisa Howard
April 19, 2021
In January 2020, Nam Tran and his colleagues in the UC Davis Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine were scaling up testing platforms for seasonal influenza and the common cold.
Tran, a professor of clinical pathology in the UC Davis School of Medicine, was following reports out of China about a mysterious new respiratory virus, SARS-CoV-2. Not much was known at the time about how the novel coronavirus spread or what the mortality rate was.
Tran was mindful of how fast viruses can spread globally. He led the laboratory’s response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic and had experience with the 2009 novel H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Like many, he thought the outbreak might follow a similar course to the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, outbreak in 2003, which resulted in 774 deaths worldwide.