Opinion: To accelerate innovation, the CDC should ease limits on which labs can handle the coronavirus
Not long after SARS-CoV-2 was first identified in December 2019 as the cause of an alarming cluster of severe pneumonia cases in central China, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention correctly advised that the virus should be isolated and studied only in laboratories with advanced containment capabilities, meaning those with a biosafety level (BSL) of 3 or higher.
Things have changed radically since then. In huge swaths of the country, Americans are being instructed to shelter in place under the assumption that any human contact carries a high risk of transmitting the virus.
