Diagnosis of COVID-19. What have we learned after two years of the pandemic?

A public health crisis has been threatening the world since the new 2019 coronavirus (2019-nCoV) or severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged and began to spread in late 2019.

As of April 10, 2022, more than 496 million confirmed cases and more than 6 million deaths had been reported in the six WHO regions. However, the total impact of the pandemic has been far greater than reported deaths indicate.

Although reported deaths from COVID-19 between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, were 5.94 million worldwide, a recent work estimates that 18.2 million people actually died worldwide due to the COVID-19 pandemic (measured by excess mortality during that period) [1].

CITA DEL ARTÍCULO  Adv Lab Med. 2022 Jun 15;3(2):97-102.  doi: 10.1515/almed-2022-0041. eCollection 2022 Jun