THE ROLE OF MEDICAL LABORATORIES IN DISEASE DIAGNOSIS
Keywords:
medical laboratories, disease diagnosis, healthcare, diagnostic tests, patient care.Abstract
Coronaviruses are encapsulated, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses belonging to the subfamily Coronavirinae in the family Coronaviridae. These viruses have been shown to infect various hosts, such as mammals and birds. In humans, coronaviruses can lead to a wide range of respiratory tract infections, from common colds to more severe pathologies such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (Tomo et al., 2020).
The current ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, Hubei province, in a seafood market. Several cases of pneumonia were reported in patients without any history of exposure to a seafood market. The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was later identified in patients and confirmed as the etiological agent responsible for these infections. To date, SARS-CoV-2 has already affected over 180 countries, causing over 7 million confirmed cases and leading to the death of >400,000 individuals.
Clinical laboratories are a vital contributor to most of the diagnoses and management of diseases in a hospital setting. A hospital setup requires various diagnostic modalities to handle the burden of health care and to take necessary measures for patient care. Medical testing of any clinical specimen to obtain health information is considered a larger field, and a medical laboratory is the physically represented site of clinical laboratory science—a medical laboratory or clinical laboratory is a laboratory for medical sciences that conducts tests on clinical specimens in order to provide information for the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease (K. Krishna & M. Cunnion, 2012).
