Laboratory Diagnosis of Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Infection

A cluster of pneumonia cases were reported to World Health Organization (WHO) on 31st December, 2019 from the city of Wuhan, China which were later identified to be caused by a novel coronavirus, named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The outbreak spread globally and on 11th March 2020, WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. There have been continuous efforts to optimize methods to screen and diagnose large proportion of coronavirus affected population. COVID-19 diagnostic approaches include real-time reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) and serological diagnosis.