The labs learned much later that the third and extra reagent that CDC included, the N3, was contaminated with coronavirus RNA. But N1 was also contaminated, although at a lower level. At some point in the manufacturing process, someone had probably walked from a dirty room, where scientists used RNA, into a clean one where they assembled the CDC kits, and carried the sticky strands of genomic material with them. Then some pieces of the RNA had gotten into both the N1 and the N3 components. This meant that two of the three primers that were designed to tell whether the test was detecting
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