**2. Importance of medical laboratory during pandemic and public health issues**

Obeta et al. [1] highlighted some importance of medical laboratory in public health matters to include rapid, accurate and prompt diagnosis for proper treatment and effective monitoring of patients' response to treatment. Medical laboratory provides up to 70% informed decisions regarding patients' hospital admissions and discharge. It guides physicians, nurses and other healthcare workers in choosing the correct laboratory tests and ensure the proper sample collection. Medical laboratory services equally carry out equipment installation, validation and repay in the healthcare laboratories. Medical laboratory component is key in infectious diseases surveillance like Ebola, Tuberculosis, HIV, Malaria and now COVID-19. Quality assurance of a healthcare facility and public health in general is made possible by medical laboratory research towards quality improvement.

Researches [1, 8–10] have shown the main functions of medical laboratory during the COVID-19 pandemic to include the following:


To achieve adequate COVID-19 monitoring and surveillance, there is need for widespread and continuous testing of not only suspected cases or contacts, but even asymptomatic and apparently healthy population in order to achieve adequate COVID-19 trend monitoring in context of rapid human-to-human spread, and prompt identification of cases.

Undoubtedly, there are many benefits of large-scale population testing for COVID-19 as demonstrated in many high-income countries. For countries that have numerous challenges in their health care delivery system in terms of medical laboratory diagnostics, house-to-house case searching and community contact tracing for infectious diseases surveillance is adequate.

Medical Laboratory plays a crucial role in monitoring co-morbidities, diagnosing complications, assessment of treatment responses and assessing the disease prevalence in the community. Advancement of molecular techniques is mainly relying on understanding the genomic and proteomic composition of COVID-19.

WHO [5, 7] emphasizes "detect, protect and treat" to break the chain of transmission of SARS-COV-2 and COVID-19. Early medical laboratory testing and immediate treatment significantly decrease future COVID-19 cases. Medical laboratory assessment reveals diagnoses, confirms or rules out prognosis based on signs and symptoms, determines severity, monitors treatment responses or complications in COVID-19. The role of medical laboratories is more evident globally today as the battle against COVID-19 rages.
