This is what I certainly don't have a handle on. They had to test people already diagnosed with cancer. So, possibly, they had to go find people outside the ready group of 500 vets they had enrolled. The assay itself takes no time, relatively. So (I continue to assume here) the real time consuming part was hiring the new guy and getting him up to speed to run the longitudinal, as well as finding people already diagnosed and willing to be guinea pigs.
I continue to hope that, at this point, all they have to do is fill in the blanks and report the results on Wednesday. But all this is all extreme speculation.