In early February 2020, Kirsten St. George and her team at New York state’s public health lab received a test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to diagnose people infected with the new, rapidly spreading coronavirus.

But, like many labs around the country, it quickly found the test gave inaccurate results. So test samples had to be sent back to the CDC for processing, wasting time and leaving state officials “sort of blind to what the situation was with the disease,”…