Abstract
The deadliness associated with the COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus plunged the entire global community into the worst times of this century. It was globally realized that a timely diagnosis, effective treatment, and prevention were the key factors in its management. Responding to the emergent scenario, sequencing of the genome of this virus was performed and shared with the scientific community in the nick of time. Thereafter, diverse sets of test kits to detect the SARS-CoV-2 and to detect the antibodies in the patients of the COVID-19 were developed at the war scale. It was indeed a war but with a microscopic spiky package of 50–200 nanometres in diameter having a genome of about 29.9 kb encoding deadly tools in its arsenal.
For the reason, patients of the COVID-19 exhibit diverse symptoms from mild influenza-like to potentially fatal ones that overlap with other respiratory diseases, only efficient testing was essential during the early stages of infection to identify COVID-19 patients among others. The diverse test kits designed exclusively for rapid and accurate outcomes proved instrumental in identifying individuals among asymptomatics, presymptomatics, and symptomatics. The test kits have also been playing an appreciable role in identifying communities with hot spots to facilitate proper management. To meet the demand of higher throughput and simplification of the testing process, novel ways were devised that did not otherwise allow the testing spree to get hit with pandemic supply bottlenecks.
Mechanistic models have played an essential role in shaping public health policy. The regulatory agencies, both at the world health and the regional public health levels, shared the knowledge and experience on the test kits that helped in the development and improvement in the testing capability and efficiency of the testing infrastructure. The information about the emergence of variants of the SARS-CoV-2 happening due to intrinsic behavior of the viral genomes drew attention of the test kit developers, regulatory agencies, and end-users to be vigilant over the test outcomes. Offering a mechanistic approach, in this chapter, testing strategies for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 disease are delineated.
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Gill, S.S., Gill, R.K., Sobti, R.C. (2021). Testing Strategy of Covid-19: A Mechanistic Approach. In: Sobti, R.C., Dhalla, N.S., Watanabe, M., Sobti, A. (eds) Delineating Health and Health System: Mechanistic Insights into Covid 19 Complications. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-5105-2_2
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