 We need to produce 24 hours result, that means that we have to work three shifts, 12 hours, 12 hours, 12 hours. We've been working very long hours, but at the end of the day, people's lives matter and the country comes first. I'm a microbiologist by profession. Looking at these organisms that cause infectious diseases is something that I'm passionate about. So at the moment in Timor-Este, the country is facing probably the hardest moment in the COVID-19 pandemic. The Delta variant has entered the country, it's transmitting rapidly through the community, and we're seeing very high case numbers and also seeing more severe cases. Timor-Este has done an amazing job actually in responding to this global crisis and for a long time managed to keep COVID-19 cases restricted to within quarantine, which really helped to prepare for what would inevitably come around March. There started being cases within the community and cases spread quite quickly and then in early April, Timor-Este was affected by terrible floods, particularly in Dilly. The flood pushed the crowd towards a certain area together. They lost their homes because of the flooding. People have been forced to take an evacuation shelter and I think that's one of the reasons why we have widespread coronaviruses. During the flood we stopped for 24 hours. A massive amount of work put in on the Easter Sunday and from the laboratory with everyone getting around to try to clear the water out. The guys on the grounds really did a tremendous job to be back on our feet within 48 hours. After it was affected by flood, there was something that was unimaginable. It was a really concerning time because there were so many people who were forced out of their homes into temporary shelters, into temporary accommodation to be able to survive that few weeks and so it just pushed a lot of people together and I think was unfortunately just the perfect transmission ground for COVID-19 to spread rapidly. And after that we started to see the spike of cases. I'm a pediatrician and have been working very closely with the Pediatric Department at the National Hospital here in Timor and amongst the pediatric doctors at the time was Dr Carla Madeira whose husband, Nevio Cemento, happened to be one of the first microbiology trained scientists in the country. He had recently returned from having done his Masters and was really passionate about being able to establish services for diagnosing infectious diseases in Timor-Leste. I saw the opportunity of working with Manges to increase my knowledge in areas of microbiology and infectious disease and that's why I joined the team and have been working with the team ever since. Yes and it already grew morphologically, it grew the... We became very good friends over this time and have plotted and planned together and worked really closely with the Ministry of Health and the National Laboratory to try to think through how to respond to some of the infectious diseases challenges that are already here in Timor-Leste but then over the last couple of years to apply some of those same principles to try to respond effectively to COVID-19 as well. The lab needed to be ready because the pandemic is happening and we knew the capacity of the lab needed to scale up then the collaborations between National Health Laboratory and Manges worked to expand the National Health Laboratory and I could say it was a very long ride. And introducing the testing capacity for COVID-19 was a big challenge. It wasn't a small thing to undertake at all and it has required significant investment in the infrastructure in the laboratory. It's required a lot of training but it's been really great over the last year and a half to see how much that has seen the work of the National Health Laboratory grow. When the COVID-19 testing started in about April 2020 the capacity of the laboratory was around 10 to 20 tests per day but in response to the increasing need and the capacity of the laboratory has grown so the laboratory is doing over a thousand tests a day most days. We are expanding to all the districts. Now we have five referral hospitals and eight satellite areas where we can test PCA COVID-19 in the municipalities. I think coronavirus is here to stay and it has been a good learning curve for National Health Laboratory for all the scientists, for all the frontline workers to prepare more for what to come in the future.