Update on Rapid Diagnostics for COVID-19: A Systematic Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The submitted review about the rapid diagnostics of COVID-19 using POC and RDT tests are of certain importance for the effective control of COVID-19 pandemic situation globally. Personally, this review will be of citation values for the detection and diagnosis of COVID-19. I recommend this manuscript for publication with major revisions.

(1) Please review the use of abbreviation terms, and ensure that each term is spelled out for first use in manuscript (not including abstract), and then abbreviation used for the remainder of the manuscript. Do not use abbreviation in the abstract, like line 22: "POC and RDTs".

(2) Some key findings and conclusions provided in the Abstract should be curtailed and made more succinct because these are clearly described in Results and Discussion. In addition, narrating every analysis output will be boring for readers.

(3) In order to show the performance of SARS-CoV-2 rapid diagnostics tests, I would recommend adding a separate Figure describing that sensitivity and specificity of tests, like in the previous study: Int. Immunopharmacol. 2021, 101, 108144.

(4) In the background section of the article, "Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) directly detect SARS-CoV-2 proteins and are an alternative for fast and inexpensive diagnosis of COVID-19. Antigen RDTs (Ag-RDT) can be used at the point of care (POC) and contribute to increasing testing, reducing the spread of the infection due to early self-isolation". The advantages of POC test should be further discussed in this section. Please see recent works, e.g., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 207-213; Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 12157-12164; Chem. Sci., 2021,12, 9022-9030; Biosens. Bioelectron., 2022, 201, 13944; Microchim. Acta, 2022, 189, 128.

(5) The paragraph on lines 204-212 is a repetition of the one before it. In addition, try to reduce repetition of results in the discussion but focus on providing explanations to why the results are like that.

(6) There are many careless mistakes in the references, for example:

Ref. 54: "Sens and Act" should be changed to "Sens. Actuator B-Chem.";

Ref. 60: "Nature" should be changed to "Sci Rep.";

Ref. 62: the title should be "Magnetofluidic immuno-PCR for point-of-care COVID-19 serological testing".

The whole list of references should be revised very carefully.

Author Response

(1) Please review the use of abbreviation terms, and ensure that each term is spelled out for first use in manuscript (not including abstract), and then abbreviation used for the remainder of the manuscript. Do not use abbreviation in the abstract, like line 22: "POC and RDTs".

All these requests were accepted

(2) Some key findings and conclusions provided in the Abstract should be curtailed and made more succinct because these are clearly described in Results and Discussion. In addition, narrating every analysis output will be boring for readers.

we have changed the description of these findings to make them less redundant and tedious in the document.

(3) In order to show the performance of SARS-CoV-2 rapid diagnostics tests, I would recommend adding a separate Figure describing that sensitivity and specificity of tests, like in the previous study: Int. Immunopharmacol. 2021, 101, 108144.

Two figures were created.

(4) In the background section of the article, "Rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) directly detect SARS-CoV-2 proteins and are an alternative for fast and inexpensive diagnosis of COVID-19. Antigen RDTs (Ag-RDT) can be used at the point of care (POC) and contribute to increasing testing, reducing the spread of the infection due to early self-isolation". The advantages of POC test should be further discussed in this section. Please see recent works, e.g., J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 207-213; Chem. Sci., 2020, 11, 12157-12164; Chem. Sci., 2021,12, 9022-9030; Biosens. Bioelectron., 2022, 201, 13944; Microchim. Acta, 2022, 189, 128.

We reformulate this paragraph.

(5) The paragraph on lines 204-212 is a repetition of the one before it. In addition, try to reduce repetition of results in the discussion but focus on providing explanations to why the results are like that.

We reformulate this section profoundly to improve the discussion and explain the results obtained.

(6) There are many careless mistakes in the references, for example:

Ref. 54: "Sens and Act" should be changed to "Sens. Actuator B-Chem.";

Ref. 60: "Nature" should be changed to "Sci Rep.";

Ref. 62: the title should be "Magnetofluidic immuno-PCR for point-of-care COVID-19 serological testing".

The whole list of references should be revised very carefully.

We revised all the references

Reviewer 2 Report

This systematic review (data published from November 2020 to November 2021 in PubMed and Google 19 Scholar databases) provides an update on rapid diagnostic for COVID-19The analysis, the data presented and the workflow are useful and fairly well presented. Therefore I believe this review could be of interest to clinical researchers and overall the laboratory medicine field. There are a few minor changes I suggest and can be found in the attached pdf file.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

How and why only 520 studies were elegible? You explained the exclusion criteria for the 52 full-text selection but not for the elegibility.

The eligibility criterion was the presence of all searched terms in the title, keywords, or abstract in the articles. We modified figure 1 to show this information.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

In the revised version, some of the reviewer's comments are still not addressed. In addition, several literatures were not corrected cited, such as ref.10, 11 (2020, in press?). Worse still, the authors claimed that rapid diagnostic tests and point of care tests have limited benefits. This kind of statement is one-side, the authors should read more references to find the proper conclusions. POCTs have been widely used in many countries, which feature rapid, high responsiveness and flexibility, low-cost advantages, and traceable testing in COVID-19 diagnostics. The limitations of POCT claimed by the authors are fairly subjective, since the authors only chose part of the studies published from 01 Nov 2020 until 30 Nov 2021. In this case, the readers would get one sided view if the current version of this paper was published. Therefore, I would suggest the authors to broaden the time range of the studies, and more importantly, original articles should be cited to give due credit.

Author Response

We appreciate the reviewer's criticisms of the article, which were very important for us to improve it. Therefore, we will answer them all below:

In the revised version, some of the reviewer's comments are still not addressed. In addition, several literatures were not corrected cited, such as ref.10, 11 (2020, in press?).

We carefully read the text and the reviewers' comments to answer all of them, especially the references that were corrected using a reference manager.

Worse still, the authors claimed that rapid diagnostic tests and point of care tests have limited benefits. This kind of statement is one-side, the authors should read more references to find the proper conclusions. POCTs have been widely used in many countries, which feature rapid, high responsiveness and flexibility, low-cost advantages, and traceable testing in COVID-19 diagnostics.

We have made changes to the text to make it clear that the tests are essential and have acceptable levels of quality. However, they could be improved by including cross-reaction tests with other pathogens that may have similar symptoms, especially against other coronaviruses.

The limitations of POCT claimed by the authors are fairly subjective, since the authors only chose part of the studies published from 01 Nov 2020 until 30 Nov 2021. In this case, the readers would get one sided view if the current version of this paper was published. Therefore, I would suggest the authors to broaden the time range of the studies, and more importantly, original articles should be cited to give due credit.

We highlight in the text that our study's main objective was to compare the performance of the tests described in the articles in the second year of the pandemic with the same methodology described in our first paper with the analysis of articles from the first years so pandemic. In this way, we will show readers how the tests evaluated in the second year of the pandemic differed from those tested in the first year within the same 12-month period. We also mentioned the several limitations of our study (line 334).

We have not updated the tests to date because our intention has always been to evaluate the evolution of the tests and not necessarily to carry out an up-to-date study. In addition, it is challenging to carry out all these analyses in such a short time for submission for publication.

Furthermore, it would be impossible to add data from the last six months of publications, perform all analyses, and create new graphs and tables within the ten days we have been granted to respond to your criticisms.

For this reason, we decided to keep the study time interval and generate Figure 4 to illustrate the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy data of the tests analyzed in the two periods.

Regarding citing the original studies, as we established a criterion for selecting articles for our analysis, and because not all diagnostic methods were previously described in a publication, we consider it appropriate to cite only the articles that described the analyses.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

I believe the manuscript has been sufficiently improved to warrant publication in IJTM.