12 Facts About COVID-19 testing

COVID-19 testing involves analyzing samples to assess the current or past presence of SARS-CoV-2.

Individual jurisdictions have adopted varied COVID-19 testing protocols, including whom to test, how often to test, analysis protocols, sample collection and the uses of test results.

Rapid self-tests and point-of-care COVID-19 testing are available and can offer a faster and less expensive method to test for the virus although with a lower accuracy.

COVID-19 testing can be identified with higher precision using CT than with RT-PCR.

Shortages of reagent and other COVID-19 testing supplies became a bottleneck for mass COVID-19 testing in the EU, the UK and the US.

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Pooled COVID-19 testing can improve turnaround time, by combining a number of samples to be tested together.

Pool COVID-19 testing was then adopted in Israel, Germany, Ghana South Korea, Nebraska, China and the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra.

COVID-19 testing tends to grow exponentially at the beginning of an outbreak, meaning that the number of required tests initially grows exponentially.

Summary review in BMJ has noted that while some "serological tests … might be cheaper and easier to implement at the point of care [than RT-PCR]", and such COVID-19 testing can identify previously infected individuals, "caution is warranted … using serological tests for … epidemiological surveillance".

WHO recommends countries that do not have testing capacity and national laboratories with limited experience on COVID-19 send their first five positives and the first ten negative COVID-19 samples to one of the 16 WHO reference laboratories for confirmatory testing.

Korea already had a system for isolating, COVID-19 testing and treating infectious disease patients separately from others.

Shortage of trained medical laboratory scientists, assay reagents, analyzers, transport medium, and PPE coupled with high demand had limited initially limited the availability of COVID-19 testing and led to significantly increased turnaround times.