Laboratory diagnosis of emerging human coronavirus infections – the state of the art

By M. Loeffelholz, Yi-Wei Tang. Emerging Microbes and Infections, 2020

754 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT The three unprecedented outbreaks of emerging human coronavirus (HCoV) infections at the beginning of the twenty-first century have highlighted the necessity for readily available, accurate and fast diagnostic testing methods. The laboratory diagnostic methods for human coronavirus infections have evolved substantially, with the development of novel assays as well as the availability of updated tests for emerging ones. Newer laboratory methods are fast, highly sensitive and specific, and are gradually replacing the conventional gold standards. This presentation reviews the current laboratory methods available for testing coronaviruses by focusing on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak going on in Wuhan. Viral pneumonias typically do not result in the production of purulent sputum. Thus, a nasopharyngeal swab is usually the collection method used to obtain a specimen for testing. Nasopharyngeal specimens may miss some infections; a deeper specimen may need to be obtained by bronchoscopy. Alternatively, repeated testing can be used because over time, the likelihood of the SARS-CoV-2 being present in the nasopharynx increases. Several integrated, random-access, point-of-care molecular devices are currently under development for fast and accurate diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infections. These assays are simple, fast and safe and can be used in the local hospitals and clinics bearing the burden of identifying and treating patients.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91d97352032581972e5e0fa41f3851aaf87f5e6c

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Citations in the corpus

• Coronavirus Diseases (COVID-19) Current Status and Future Perspectives: A Narrative Review (2020, methodology): “For patients with suspected infection, the following diagnosis techniques are utilised: performing real-time fluorescence (RT-PCR) to detect the positive nucleic acid of SARS-CoV-2 in sputum, throat swabs, and secretions of the lower respiratory tract samples [30].”
• A Deep Learning System to Screen Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pneumonia (2020, positive): “The accessibility of nucleic acid testing has greatly improved in the past three months, but shortcomings still exist, such as high operating requirements, a time-consuming procedure, and a relatively low positive rate [8,9].”