The core of any effective response to COVID-19 must be a robust testing strategy. On September 10, 2020, CIFAR Fellow Eran Elinav (Weizmann Institute of Science) and CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Naama Geva-Zatorsky (Technion), both members of CIFAR’s Humans & the Microbiome program, joined CIFAR’s Rachel Parker to discuss how they have quickly pivoted their research toward the development of two different COVID-19 diagnostic tests, one using high-throughput robots and the other using at-home saliva kits.