Fight with Covid-19 Still Continues; Strategies and Agreements to Expand Covid-19 Diagnostic Centers Globally.

Sanitizer, mask, and social distancing. These three words have become mantras everywhere to remember the precautions. The whole world has been through the immense and deadly impacts of the unsolicited arrival of the pandemic. Every country entered lockdown and strict regulations were imposed in order to curb the monstrous fire of this unknown virus. Yet, until now it took the death toll to 1,241,912.

Even after almost a year, the pandemic continues to wreak havoc with 49,175,499 confirmed cases in 216 countries and territories. Not just health but the outcome of the pandemic has impacted a lot of other aspects as well. The lockdown imposed everywhere has lowered the rate of the world economy and increased the rate of recession and unemployment all across the world. Most often, it has impacted our lifestyles. We were all introduced to new norms and routines.

With the hope of having a vaccine by the end of 2020, people everywhere accepted new situations. However, the lack of vaccine and fewer diagnosis centers have fueled the growth of the patients. Meanwhile, several regions have come up with their medicines to fight the virus, and there are some treatments available. On the other hand, every region majorly focused to expand its diagnostic centers. The countries followed various strategies and made numerous agreements to increase diagnostic centers all over the world.

In April 2020, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) had announced its $1.5 billion initiative to speed up the diagnostic tests for coronavirus. The program was initiated to upsurge the capacity for SARS-CoV-2 testing in the region. In India, on the other hand, the government along with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW) undertook significant approaches to expand the scale of testing including uniting the resources, investments for resources, counterfeiting public and private partnerships, and training for human resources to enhance the test count per day.

Other than this, recently the global collaboration the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator has announced a set of agreements to enable the availability of 120 million qualitative and affordable COVID-19 rapid tests for low- and middle-income countries. The organizations participated in the global agreement include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), the Global Fund, Unitaid, the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Presently, the most extensively used diagnostic test to detect Coronavirus is reverse transcriptase PCR or RT PCR. This diagnostic test is acknowledged to be the gold standard for the diagnosis of various infectious agents. However, the multiplex RT-PCR, is the most preferred diagnostic test for Covid-19, as it offers an ability to perform multiple target sequences instantaneously. At the same time, the leading manufacturers of diagnostic kits are also growing up the capacity to perform such tests by systematic automated SARS-CoV-2 testing systems, considerably. A report published by Allied Market Research revealed that the Covid-19 diagnostics market estimated $73.19 million in the first quarter of 2020, and is expected to generate $9.94 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020. Nevertheless, the factors such as a significant surge in the incidences of Covid-19 infection and the unavailability of specific medicines/vaccines are anticipated to proliferate the growth of diagnostic centers in the coming time.

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