In early 2020, the world of pathology and infectious disease testing was thrown into chaos by the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the key challenges in the global testing programmes for Covid-19 is how to track very large numbers of patient samples passing through inexperienced or under-staffed laboratories that have been asked to increase their daily throughput by as much as 10 times their normal workload. Neil Benn and Stephen Knight at Ziath Ltd explain more about the Covid-19 testing protocol.