Emergence of a Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Importance of Diagnostic Testing: Why Partnership between Clinical Laboratories, Public Health Agencies, and Industry Is Essential to Control the Outbreak
Matthew J Binnicker
Clinical Chemistry, hvaa071, https://doi.org/10.1093/clinchem/hvaa071
In late December 2019, Chinese health authorities investigated a cluster of atypical pneumonia cases occurring primarily in individuals who had visited a seafood and wet market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Patients reported fever and cough, and most developed chest discomfort and/or respiratory distress, with a diagnosis of pneumonia being made by chest radiographs and/or computed tomographic (CT) scan (1,). After testing for common causes of respiratory infection yielded negative results, unbiased sequencing of bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) fluid identified a variant beta-coronavirus with nearly 85% sequence homology to that of a bat severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like coronavirus (CoV) (1,). The virus was subsequently isolated in eukaryotic cell culture, and further characterization showed it to be distinct from SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, with sequence homology of approximately 79% and about 50%, respectively (2,). The variant CoV, which has been named SARS-CoV-2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (3,), represents the seventh CoV to cause disease in humans, and the third CoV since 2003 to cross over from animals to humans and be associated with severe respiratory illness (1). The World Health Organization (WHO) has named the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19).
