Doing PCR tests - which is not at all a rapid process - just got a whole lot easier with a new device donated by BEL. It's called an extraction machine and Manzanero explains how it greatly reduces the amount of time lab technologists have to spend working a sample:

Dr. Marvin Manzanero, DHS
"On average as I understand it they would be able to extract twenty samples in one hour and this is one lab technician doing that. So imagine five hundred samples that are arriving in one day at the lab, so you have one lab technician extracting twenty samples every hour and then if you load it up into the machine. With this machine as I understand it, they will be able to extract ninety-six samples in minutes right, so if you do that then you start to do that maths so maybe they do that then maybe they can process what three hundred plus samples in perhaps one hour. So if you run that machine and they have three machines so maybe they can do seven hundred eight hundred samples in one day. Again that's a lab situation. the training this Monday and I think they started doing the test runs yesterday."

Channel 7