Diagnostics Working Group

Scaling up diagnostics during a pandemic is critical. COVID-19 testing lies at the foundation of a region's response. Only if people know their status can we reach our global goal of ending the pandemic as a public health threat.

The ongoing establishment of The Global Health Network's 'COVID-19 Working Groups' aims to address the discussion and gather consensus on the emerging COVID-19 research gaps across low-resource settings. This group was created to identify ways to enable better diagnostics and testing procedures. 

Around 200 researchers from across the globe working or wanting to work in intervention trials have come together in this group to discuss ideas, form collaborations, access funding as well as share outputs and resources that others can use. There is so much experience that can be applied here - let’s use that to help this immediate need for supporting research everywhere there are cases, now!

Current Work

On the 12^th June, The Global Health Network supported the first virtual team meeting for the ‘Diagnostic Evaluation and Testing Open Working Group’. 

The meeting was organised in response to questions raised in the COVID-19 workshops which highlighted the need for greater discussion around how to best enable diagnosis of COVID-19.

Following this first meeting, suggested starting points were:

1. Strong call to do surveillance work on comorbidities and coinfections.
2. Shared protocols and creating a core protocol for testing?
3. Writing a position paper to influence their research priorities.
4. Examine the potential roles of test pooling, sputum sampling and LAMP tests in diagnosis of COVID-19.

Following this first meeting, team leaders met on the 20^th of July and  decided to work on a position paper highlighting the challenges of diagnostics studies across LMICs. 

The team has been working and has shaped the outline for the position paper. Team leaders have been meeting and working on the paper: 

• 31^st of July (minutes here)
• 8^th of September (minutes here)
• 9^th of Octobre (view the minutes)
• 23rd of October (view the minutes)

Leaders continue writing. Updates on this will be posted soon.

Working Documents

Here you are able to find all the working documents from the different WGs for you to comment on

Become a Part of This Working Group

If you are interested in joining this group please register your interest and we will be in touch! We look forward to hearing from you and hope we can work together to support a strong and equitable global research response during this pandemic.