Survey of Articles on COVID-19 Testing

Hello everyone. Since there are many research papers and articles on covid-19 testing, Me and Rohan Sukumaran curate a list of few of them and provide a brief description of each.

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1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025631 — Mina J ., et. al. testing landscape paper. Here they try to show how we are supposedly doing all the tests wrong and how an antigen test or any at-home test done every day is the key. They also shows how the test results could be useless if its turnaround time is more than a day or so.
2. https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/556/eabc7075 — They work on reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and claim that it has potential as simple and scalable testing methods, despite being less sensitive compared to RT-qPCR.
3. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.07.20161737v1 — Describes lamPORE. It is a scalable method that can give 96 samples in 2 hours. They achieve 0.993 AUC.
4. https://publichealth.yale.edu/salivadirect/ — Talks about SalivaDirect. SalivaDirect is a method for testing, which uses a similar molecular process as RT-qPCR, but is cheaper and reduces stress on the supply chains. On 15th August 2020, it was issued Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the US Food and Drug Administration.
5. https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029 — The researchers propose that they can detect the presence of COVID within an asymptomatic patient by making them force cough and then analyzing the speech signals associated with it. Although this might fail on symptomatic people (as it’s harder to distinguish between asthma, influenza, etc.).
6. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/pooled-sample-testing-and-screening-testing-covid-19#pooled — The paper is about the pooled testing mechanisms and points out how it has a higher chance of false negative, especially if not validated properly. The article talks about swab pooling and media pooling and advises that pooling may be done if we’re expecting a lower prevalence of positive cases. An authorized lab for such testing must follow the manufacturer’s instructions.
7. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/A-National-Decision-Point-Effective-Testing-Screening-for-Covid-19-Full-Report.pdf — Provides FDA sensitivities and specificities for different tests (EUAs).
8. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/which-test-is-best-for-covid-19-2020081020734 — The article claims that a molecular test using a deep nasal swab is the best option, due to the fewer false negatives of this type of test as compared to other diagnostic tests or samples from throat swabs. We don’t have a definitive “gold standard” test with which to compare all the tests.
9. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/coronavirus-testing-basics — Explains the basics of the diagnostic test — molecular and antigen; and antibody test. Molecular tests take a day and sometimes weeks to complete. Antigen tests have a few hours to complete and antibody tests take 1–3 days to complete.
10. https://www.health.com/condition/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus-home-tests — Tells about at-home tests. There are about a dozen such tests available. Each cost between $100 — $150. The Turnaround time varies from 24 hours to 5 days.

We cover research papers and articles related to at-home tests, molecular tests, antigen tests etc. Hopefully, these articles will give you a better knowledge of COVID-19 tests. We will survey more similar articles in part-2. Check this blog for further reading about COVID-19 tests.