Behind the scenes, UC Davis researchers '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. The UC Davis Health Specialty Testing Center Lab team developed COVID-19 testing capable of performing more than 1,000 tests per day. Tran is a professor of clinical pathology at the UC Davis School of Medicine. He 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.