Scientists have developed a new portable, pocket-sized test called NIRVANA that can diagnose COVID-19 in minutes as well as tracking the sequence of coronavirus spread of mutations and variants.

The test, can simultaneously test for other viruses such as influenza that might be mistaken for the coronavirus, the researchers said.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the US  said, ‘this is a virus detection and surveillance method that doesn't require an expensive infrastructure like other approaches,'' ''We can accomplish with one portable test the same thing that others are using two or three different tests, with different machines, to do,''

The researchers noted that testing the population is key to stopping the spread of the virus.

Also, tracking the spread of new SARS-CoV-2 variants -- some of which could respond differently to treatments or vaccines -- is critical, they said.

The current standard approach to determine whether a nasal swab is positive for COVID-19 is to run a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test to detect genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

However, if the sample is negative, patients and clinicians don't get any information on what might be causing the coronavirus-like symptoms -- unless they run separate PCR tests, using different swab samples, for other viruses.

Even if the sample is positive for SARS-CoV-2, they don't learn which COVID-19 variant a patient is infected with unless another set of tests is run, which require a large and expensive next-generation gene-sequencing machine.

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