After COVID-19 infects the human body, it will propagate in the respiratory system first, so we can judge whether the human body is infected with virus by detecting the virus nucleic acid in sputum and nasopharyngeal swab. Therefore, positive nucleic acid detection can be used as the gold standard for the diagnosis of novel coronavirus infection.
Extended data:
At present, nucleic acid detection is mainly based on pcr related technology, and the process is relatively easy to develop. It is widely used as a golden method to diagnose patients with respiratory virus and coronavirus pneumonia-19. However, its disadvantage is that it usually requires high technical conditions, such as laboratory and medical protection, and the results obtained according to the existing operations are mostly time-consuming.
The implementation of isothermal nucleic acid amplification technology is expected to greatly accelerate the speed of nucleic acid detection results, but it is reported that the current Abbott virus rapid detection equipment can not help the detection results achieve satisfactory accuracy.
References:
Baidu encyclopedia-nucleic acid detection method