The long, halting, confusing road to recovery from the coronavirus

The gold standard for determining if a patient is no longer infectious would be a cell culture, in which isolated virus would be placed in cells to see if it could still reproduce, said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at the University of California at Irvine. But that’s highly labor-intensive and expensive, Noymer said. “There is no way — zero way — we can do viral cell culture at wide scale,” he said.