COVID-19 point-of-care tests and their application in the great Indian healthcare delivery pyramid

COVID-19 pandemic is spreading like wildfire. Although several countries across the world have imposed strict lockdown to break the chain of viral transmission, this respiratory inferno has not spared any country/continent. Months of lockdown brought about a sharp rise in unemployment across different parts of our country. The limited economic opportunities available forced a large numbers of daily wage labourers to migrate back towards their hometowns (countryside) which led to a further spike in COVID-19 cases referred to as “the migrant paradox ”. More recently, tens of thousands of farmers have thronged the Delhi borders in protest against new farm laws, further impending the danger of another COVID-19 hotspot. Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) has emphasised the significance of a 'test-track-treat ’as the only way for detection and prevention of COVID-19 in the country. The Indian Government has been quick to respond to World Health Organization (WHO)'s advice for increasing the level of COVID-19 testing. In resource limited countries like India with a huge population burden, accurate and scalable point-of-care (POC) tests are especially significant to reduce the time for action oriented results viz., patient isolation, contact tracing, infection prevention and control activities etc. We systematically reviewed the various published work using the terms-novel coronavirus 2019, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, human coronavirus, etc. The PubMed, NCBI, World Health Organization (WHO), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW, India), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR, India) and Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention databases were searched up to 16th December 2020. and the bibliographies of relevant studies were included in this study. We extracted the COVID-19 data as reported in the various studies discovered by this methodology and presented them in tables, figures and text. This review is an attempt to highlight the various POC tests available for SARS-CoV-2 and their application in a country like India with its multi-tiered healthcare delivery system.