Routine laboratory tests don’t help determine if someone has COVID-19 (search done on 4 May 2020)
Citation: Stegeman I, Ochodo EA, Guleid F, et al. Routine laboratory testing to determine if a patient has COVID‐19. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2020;(11):CD013787.
What is this? In the absence of specific tests for SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, tests for routine laboratory biomarkers might be used as a triage test for the infection and it is important to know if they are accurate for this purpose.
In this Cochrane rapid review, the authors searched for studies of the diagnostic accuracy of routine laboratory testing as a triage test for COVID-19. They did not restrict their searches by language of publication and did the search on 4 May 2020. They included 21 studies (14,126 COVID-19 patients and 56,185 non-COVID-19 patients), from China (17 studies), Iran (1), Italy (1), Taiwan (1) and USA (1).
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies showed that none of the 67 different laboratory tests reviewed could be used to accurately rule in or rule out COVID-19 on their own, due to low sensitivity and specificity.
At the time of this review, the included studies showed that only three tests had a summary sensitivity and specificity above 50% (interleukin-6, increase in C-reactive protein and lymphocyte count decrease), which is below the threshold of 80% sensitivity required to prioritize patients for treatment.