Co-Diagnostics, Inc.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Code Diagnostics third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Before we begin, we would like to inform listeners that certain statements made by co-diagnostics during the course of this call may constitute forward-looking statements. Any statement about company expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, assumptions of future events, or performance are forward-looking statements. For example, statements concerning 2020 financial and operational guidance, the development, regulatory clearance, commercialization, and features of new products, plans, and objectives of management and market trends are all forward-looking statements. The company believes these statements are based on reasonable assumptions. However, these statements are not guarantees of performance and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause the actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by such statements. Important factors which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in these forward-looking statements are detailed in co-diagnostics filings with the SEC. Co-diagnostics assumes no obligation and expressly disclaims any duty to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances occurring after this call or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. In addition, the company will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures during today's call. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with GAAP results. We refer you to the company's earnings released out shortly before this call, which contains reconciliation to the non-GAAP financial measures presented in their most comparable GAAP results. I will now turn the time over to Dwight Egan. Dwight?

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us on the call. The third quarter represents an important period of continued growth and development for the company. In my remarks today, I will address management's view of the current status of COVID-19, including our COVID-19 strategy, our views regarding antigen and antibody tests, and the ramifications of vaccination. I will also address our overall strategy as it relates to the company's ambitions to establish our core co-primer technology as an important player in molecular diagnostics across several verticals in which we have continued to make important progress during the year. Finally, I will speak to the status of our new extraction-free technical advance in testing for COVID-19 and other common diseases such as the flu with raw saliva samples. With respect to the current status of COVID-19, Dr. Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, responded to a MarketWatch reporter in August by saying the following. We will be dealing with this virus forever. Effective and safe vaccines and hopefully ones with some durability will be very important, even critical tools in fighting it. But the whole world is going to be experiencing COVID-19 until the end of time. We're not going to be vaccinating our way out of this to eight plus billion people in the world right now. And if we don't get durable immunity, we're potentially looking at revaccination on a routine basis if we can do that. We've really got to come to grips with actually living with this virus for at least my lifetime. In mid-September, on Meet the Press, Osterholm said, looking forward, we're now leveled off at about 40,000 cases a day, 8,000 more than when the House was on fire back in March. With the colleges and universities opening, with the spillover that's occurring, we're going to see these numbers grow substantially. If a vaccine does become available, it won't be in any meaningful way until the beginning of next year, and then it's going to take us months to vaccinate the population of just this country. We really have another 12 to 14 months of a really hard road ahead of us.