As the White House and state governments debate the best way to reopen the economy and relax social distancing guidelines, the need for more coronavirus testing keeps coming up.

“It can be extraordinarily helpful in terms of guiding our framework and indicators for reopening,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said this week about expanding his state’s testing capacity. “It’s not, at this moment, a panacea, but it could be profoundly significant.”

In the 1960s, scientists developed a vaccine to protect against RSV, a virus that causes pneumonia in infants. But it had severe, unintended results: The majority of the vaccinated babies who contracted the respiratory syncytial virus became even sicker, and two toddlers died.

In mid-February, doctors diagnosed 48-year-old Christine Rayburn from Olympia, Wash., with breast cancer that had already spread to her lymph nodes. Her doctor recommended immediate surgery to remove the tumor. But the hospital canceled the surgery as the COVID-19 outbreak ramped up in Seattle, just an hour north.

On March 21, 38-year-old Jim Santilli thought he was going to die. Lying in the hospital in Clinton Township, Mich., with COVID-19, he gasped for air and felt like he was slowly drowning. Then, an infectious disease specialist decided to give him a combination of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the widely used antibiotic azithromycin.

Some researchers are using COVID-19 as an opportunity to promote research on the body parts of aborted babies.

In some Chinese hospitals, robots clean, remove contaminated items, and deliver food and medicine to patients to keep humans from spreading the new coronavirus. The robots can work for up to eight hours after charging for 20 minutes and return to the charging station when their power runs low.

While scientists scramble to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, others are working to unravel the mystery of how the new virus developed. It seems to have jumped from an animal host to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, but theories about where it originated continue to surface.