Illinois lab begins testing for new coronavirus

The Illinois Department of Public Health has started testing for the 2019 novel coronavirus in its Chicago lab.

The flu-like disease, officially named COVID-19 on Tuesday, has ranged from mild to serious and can cause pneumonia.

The World Health Organization has convened outside experts to try to speed the development of tests, treatments and vaccines against the new coronavirus out of China, as doctors on the front lines experiment on patients with various drugs in hopes of saving lives in the meantime.

The Illinois Department of Public Health is providing an assist to the Centers for Disease Control.

Jennifer Crew, PhD, runs the department's virology lab. She says false negatives are possible if somebody has just been exposed and they don't have enough virus for us to detect, or if they're near the end of an infection and there's also not going to be enough virus to detect.