Oh cool: Mike Springer, one of my Mystery Hunt teammates on Left Out, won a prize for his team's work developing a high-throughput COVID testing system in the early days of the pandemic.

To do this, the team worked with Richard Novak, then at the Wyss Institute, to co-create a swab that allowed for collection of samples that could be semi-automatically processed. The swab did not require liquid transport media, which simplified logistics.
In its first year of operation, the lab ran over 2.2 million COVID-19 tests at a greatly reduced cost per test.

I helped ~~playtest~~ test the system. I didn't notice anything weird about the swab or whatever; it was the early days, and it was the first COVID test I took. I didn't have anything to compare it to. Gee, if I'd known the swab was so special, maybe I would have hung onto it as a souvenir oh wait no the lab needed it back for their measurements never mind.