The COVID-19 pandemic has created huge damage to society and
brought panic around the world. Such panic can be ascribed to
the seemingly deceptive features of COVID-19: Compared to other
deadly viral outbreaks, it has medium transmission and mortality
rates. As a result, the severity of the causative coronavirus,
SARS-CoV-2, was deeply underestimated by society at the
beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Based on this, in this
review, we define the viruses with features similar to those of
SARS-CoV-2 as the Panic Zone viruses. To contain those viruses,
accurate and fast diagnosis followed by effective isolation and
treatment of patients are pivotal at the early stage of virus
breakouts. This is especially true when there is no cure or
vaccine available for a transmissible disease, which is the case
for the current COVID-19 pandemic. As of July 2020, more than
100 kits for COVID-19 diagnosis on the market have been surveyed
in this review, while emerging sensing techniques for SARS-CoV-2
are also discussed. It is of critical importance to rationally
use these kits for efficient management and control of the Panic
Zone viruses. Therefore, we discuss guidelines to select
diagnostic kits at different outbreak stages of the Panic Zone
viruses, SARS-CoV-2 in particular. While it is of utmost
importance to use nucleic acid based detection kits with low
false negativity (high sensitivity) at the early stage of an
outbreak, the low false positivity (high specificity) gains
importance at later stages of the outbreak. When society is set
to reopen from the lockdown stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, it
becomes critical to have immunoassay based kits with high
specificity to identify people who can safely return to society
after their recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infections. Finally, since
a massive attack from a viral pandemic requires a massive
defense from the whole society, we urge both government and the
private sector to research and develop affordable and reliable
point-of-care testing (POCT) kits, which can be used massively
by the general public (and therefore called massive POCT) to
contain Panic Zone viruses in the future.