Background: The recent outbreak by a novel coronavirus originated from Wuhan, China in 2019, and is progressively spreading to other countries. Timely diagnosis of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) improves the survival of the patients and also prevents the transmission of the infection. In this study, we reviewed the applicable and available methods for the diagnosis of COVID-19.
Methods: For the review, we systematically searched Web of Science, PubMed, and Iranian articles that were published about COVID-19 diagnostic methods with a combination of the key terms: laboratory, radiological, tests, coronavirus.
Results: Although the current gold standard diagnostic test for this virus is real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), the occasional false-negative and the low sensitivity of the test should not be underestimated. A chest computed tomography (CT) scan is another diagnostic test for COVID-19, with higher sensitivity but low specificity. A combination of sensitive RT-PCR with a chest CT scan together with the clinical features are highly recommended for the proper diagnosis. Notably, there are some other sensitive and low-cost tests for evaluation of COVID-19 infection, but their validation should be approved.
Conclusion: Since early and accurate diagnosis of the viral disease could improve the survival rate of the patients, and halt the transmission chain, it is not surprising that tremendous attempts should be made to reduce the limitations of the tests leading to the false-negative results and to find a rapid test for the diagnosis of COVID-19.
Keywords: 2019-nCov; COVID-19; Chest CT scan; Real-time RT-PCR.
© 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.