This book highlights the role of point-of-care (POC) testing in the effective management of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with an in-depth focus on the recent developments in the field, existing gaps, and future directions. POC tests are of utmost importance as they facilitate rapid and decentralized testing without much instrumentation and technical expertise. The book describes the current status of POC COVID-19 testing in three broad categories: Molecular, antigen, and antibody. The advantages, limitations, and adaption of each of the POC tests are reviewed while highlighting their clinical impact in real-world settings. The role of POC testing for COVID-19 screening, diagnosis, and surveillance has been emphasized. The subtle difference between POC and at-home tests is discussed while elaborating on the necessity for the latter for enhancing clinical impacts. A spotlight on the influence of variants on the performance of POC-COVID-19 tests is provided. The consideration of clinical implications of POC testing in hospitals with regards to improving therapeutic options, patient flow, enhancing the infection control measures, and early recruitment of patients into clinical trials is explained. Finally, the future perspectives that will aid the research community in the development of POC tests for COVID-19 or any infectious disease, in general, are presented. Overall, we believe this book can benefit the research community as it (i) presents a comprehensive understanding of current COVID-19 POC testing methods (ii) highlights features required to transform the current tests developed during the past year as POC diagnostics, and (iii) provides insights to address the unmet challenges in the field.

In The Eye of the Sandpiper, Brandon Keim pairs cutting-edge science with a deep love of nature, conveying his insights in prose that is both accessible and beautiful. In an elegant, thoughtful tour of nature in the twenty-first century, Keim continues in the tradition of Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and David Quammen, reporting from the frontiers of science while celebrating the natural world's wonders and posing new questions about our relationship to the rest of life on Earth. The stories in The Eye of the Sandpiper are arranged in four thematic sections. Each addresses nature through a different lens. The first is evolutionary and ecological dynamics, from how patterns form on butterfly wings to the ecological importance of oft-reviled lampreys. The second section explores the inner lives of animals, which science has only recently embraced: empathy in rats, emotions in honeybees, spirituality in chimpanzees. The third section contains stories of people acting on insights both ecological and ethological: nourishing blighted rivers, but also caring for injured pigeons at a hospital for wild birds and demanding legal rights for primates. The fourth section unites ecology and ethology in discussions of ethics: how we should think about and behave toward nature, and the place of wildness in a world in which space for wilderness is shrinking. By appreciating the nonhuman world more fully, Keim writes, "I hope people will also act in ways that nourish rather than impoverish its life-which is, ultimately, the problem that needs to be solved at this Anthropocene moment, with a sixth mass extinction looming, once-common animals becoming rare, and Earth straining to support 7.5 billion people. The solution will come from a love of nature rather than chastisement or lamentation."