State-of-the-art equipment for rapid and accurate diagnosis of COVID-19

Awasthi, Navchetan; Gupta, Swati; Kiran, Amritanjali; Pardasani, Rohit

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a pandemic worldwide. Containment of this pandemic requires the diagnosis of the disease at an early stage. Extensive accessibility to accurate and rapid testing procedures is the need of the hour to control SARS-CoV-2 virus infection and to check the amount of immunity in the community. As such, scientists, doctors, and individual laboratories and companies around the world have been working tirelessly to develop the critically needed test kits in huge numbers. The ready to use test kits are based on different principles including detection of viral proteins in samples obtained from feces, sputum, nasopharyngeal or oropharyngeal samples, etc., or in blood or serum, by detection of antibodies produced in the human body to fight the infection. The first kind involves molecular assays like polymerase chain reaction-based techniques for the detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus viral RNA. The second one involves serological and immunological assays which mostly rely upon antibody detection in an individual produced as a result of exposure to the virus. While the nucleic acid-based viral RNA can detect current infection in a sample, the serological tests can give an estimate of the already infected population. Medical imaging, specially chest computed tomography (CT), is another kind of technique that is becoming a supplement to the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction, especially when the results by the former technique are not certain or take time to arrive. Apart from being a diagnostic tool, the CT scan can also help in prediction, assessing the disease progression and checking whether the patient is responsive to administered therapy. This chapter will provide a comprehensive overview of the various rapid and accurate diagnosis methods for SARS COVID-19 suggested by WHO for current infection, for example, detection of viral proteins, medical imaging, and previous infection, and detection of antibodies generated during COVID-19 infections and others that are currently being researched.