Despite being the diagnostic gold standard, pathogenic lab testing is a rather time‐consuming procedure, with unavoidable false‐positive results (Wang, Kang, et al., 2020). It is recommended that lab testing should be performed, as soon as the patient is identified as a “person under investigation” (PUI). Viral nucleic acid required for an RT‐PCR test is usually extracted from secretions of the lower respiratory tract, for example, bronchoalveolar lavage; however, tracheal aspirate or sputum can also be used (Chu et al., 2020; Corman et al., 2020). Since the onset of the epidemic, several factors have been found to affect the final efficiency of nucleic acid testing, that is, availability, quality, stability, and reproducibility of detection kits. In most of the cases, the tests need to be repeated for several times (Wang, Kang, et al., 2020), as the estimated detection rate of the test falls in an underwhelming range of 30–50% (Chu et al., 2020; Corman et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). In spite of being a valuable asset, the undesirable false‐negative results of RT‐PCR have prompted careful clinical and etiological evaluation of COVID‐19 in suspected cases as the first‐line diagnostic method (Zu et al., 2020).