Diagnosis of COVID-19 in symptomatic patients: An updated review

21, June 2021 |

Authors:

Abstract

A group of pneumonia patients was detected in Hubei Province, in China in December 2019. The etiology of the disease was unknown. Later, the researchers diagnosed the novel Coro- navirus as the causal agent of this respiratory disease. On February 12th 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially named this disease Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID- 19). Consequently, the disease spread globally and became a pandemic. As there is no specific treatment for the symptomatic patients and several vaccines are approved by WHO, the effi- cacy and effectiveness of these vaccines are not fully understood yet and the availability of these vaccines are very limited. In addition, new variants and mutants of SARS-CoV-2 are thought to be able to evade the immune system of the host. So, diagnosis and isolation of infected individuals is advised. Currently, real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is considered the gold standard method to detect novel Coronavirus, how- ever, there are few limitations associated with RT-PCR such as false-negative results. This demanded another diagnostic tool to detect and isolate COVID-19 early and accurately. Chest computed tomography (CT) became another option to diagnose COVID-19 patients accurately (about 98% sensitivity). However, it did not apply to the asymptomatic carriers and sometimes the results were misinterpreted as from other groups of Coronavirus infec- tion. The combination of RT-PCR and chest CT might be the best option in detecting novel Coronavirus infection early and accurately thereby allowing adaptation of measures for the prevention and control of the COVID-19.