The Coronavirus disease 2019 continued to devastate across the lengths and breadths of the world since 30th January 2020 when World Health Organization declared CoVID-19 as pandemic, through the second wave as an unequal global public health problem. The clinical features expressed by COVID-19 patients are usually non-specific viz. cough, fever, fatigue, shortness of breath which could have been associated with any other seasonal flu; cannot be used for an accurate diagnosis even with the highest clinical acumen; many times, the infected contacts remain symptomless too. These issues led to an unprecedented scale of morbidity, mortality and disability including long-COVID and put laboratory medicine at the crossroads in search of the valid laboratory data. There is an urgent requirement of rapid, simple, and accurate battery of tests to diagnose SARS-CoV-2 infection to provide early interventions for optimum outcome at the primary care level. An increased understanding of the predictors of severity of outcomes is crucial especially in LMICs where intensive care setup might not match ever increasing demand. The gold standard for diagnosis is the identification of viral genome by real-time polymerase chain reaction in respiratory tract materials in the first week of symptoms. Laboratory tests such as complete blood count, C-reactive protein, D-dimer, interleukins, lactic dehydrogenase, troponin, and procalcitonin identify risk of disease with greater severity, myocardial damage, thromboembolic complications, and increased risk of abnormal blood clotting. Imaging tests may be useful for diagnosis, especially when the clinical pictures might not be very transparent and specific, and other tests results are unequivocal or negative.
Key words: Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, RTPCR, POCUS, D-Dimer, PCT
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