Diagnostic techniques for COVID-19 and new developments

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic is a serious global health issue today due to the rapid human to human transmission of SARS-CoV-2, a new type of coronavirus that causes fatal pneumonia. SARS -CoV-2 has a faster rate of transmission than other coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS and until now there are no approved specific drugs or vaccines for treatment. Thus, early diagnosis is crucial to prevent the extensive spread of the disease. The reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the most routinely used method until now to detect SARS-CoV-2 infections. However, several other faster and accurate assays are being developed for the diagnosis of COVID-19 aiming to control the spread of infection through the identification of patients and immediate isolation. In this review, we will discuss the various detection methods of the SARS-CoV-2 virus including the recent developments in immunological assays, amplification techniques as well as biosensors.

Disease burden and clinical severity of the first pandemic wave of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China

“…A verification of reported COVID-19 cases was conducted by Wuhan Authorities to correct for late reporting, omissions, and misreporting, with 325 laboratory-confirmed cases and 1290 deaths added to official tallies. Due to the high specificity of RT-PCR assay (almost 100%), false positives were rare 42 – 45 . We included in the analysis clinically-diagnosed cases that were reported for a brief 1-week period, when testing could not keep up, so we inevitably overestimated the true number of COVID-19 cases.…”

COVID-19 associated arterial ischaemic stroke and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children: a case report

“… 8 , 17 The negative RT-PCR for the cerebrospinal fluid sample could be attributed to low viral load in the sample, transient viraemia, and delay in testing after symptom appearance. 18 …”

Graphene-based field-effect transistor biosensors for the rapid detection and analysis of viruses: A perspective in view of COVID-19

“…Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA), Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA)) suffer from the drawback of the requirement of complex production routes of recombinant proteins and antibodies whereas amplification-based techniques (e.g. Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), Nanopore Target Sequencing (NTS)) involve skilled personnel and expensive instruments [7] . Moreover, both of these methods require complex, expensive optical imaging devices and longer time for completion.…”