The Egyptian Doctor Developing A 24-Hour COVID-19 Test at Johns Hopkins

Egyptian doctor Heba Mostafa, M.B.B.Ch., Ph.D., has helped create an in-house Coronavirus screening test at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, USA.

Dr. Mostafa, the Assistant Professor of Pathology and Director of the Molecular Virology section of the Medical Microbiology Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, said that within the first three days of administering the test, 85 tests were performed. 

Capacity is expected to ramp up quickly, reaching 180 people per day this week and 500 next week. By early April, there could be 1,000 tests per day.

“We didn’t expect this to become a pandemic,” says Dr. Mostafa. Because of the unexpected spread of the Coronavirus, the US’s public health system and state laboratories have not been able to accommodate the mass volume of testing that is required to keep up with the virus. 

Currently, the test takes 24 hours to yield results, but Dr. Mostafa hopes to get the time down to 3 hours.