The disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19), has led to a global pandemic with tremendous
mortality, morbidity, and economic loss. The current lack of
effective vaccines and treatments places tremendous value on
widespread screening, early detection, and contact tracing of
COVID-19 for controlling its spread and minimizing the resultant
health and societal impact. Bioanalytical diagnostic
technologies have played a critical role in the mitigation of
the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be foundational in
the prevention of the subsequent waves of this pandemic along
with future infectious disease outbreaks. In this Review, we aim
at presenting a roadmap to the bioanalytical testing of
COVID-19, with a focus on the performance metrics as well as the
limitations of various techniques. The state-of-the-art
technologies, mostly limited to centralized laboratories, set
the clinical metrics against which the emerging technologies are
measured. Technologies for point-of-care and do-it-yourself
testing are rapidly emerging, which open the route for testing
in the community, at home, and at points-of-entry to widely
screen and monitor individuals for enabling normal life despite
of an infectious disease pandemic. The combination of different
classes of diagnostic technologies (centralized and
point-of-care and relying on multiple biomarkers) are needed for
effective diagnosis, treatment selection, prognosis, patient
monitoring, and epidemiological surveillance in the event of
major pandemics such as COVID-19.