<p>In the year of 2020, an international pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has afflicted tens of millions of people’s life also disrupting global economics. Diagnostic testing is an important part of ensuring public health until a vaccine that has been shown to be safe and effective is made available to the general public. Most tests for detecting COVID-19 utilize quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assays, which is a specific and relatively simple quantitative assay that could provide adequate sensitivity for diagnosing early infection. Although powerful, these lab-based molecular assays have a significant lag time, usually several days before receiving results. To satisfy the needs of different purposes (diagnostics, screening, and surveillance), a unified approach is impractical. This thesis presents an alternative testing method supporting the current procedure of point of care (POC) testing and in community testing. This paper-based test overcomes the limitations of current testing methods by utilizing reverse-transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and receiving the result on-site by a color change in the presence of the virus within 60 minutes. The test utilizes untreated freshly collected saliva, a less invasive specimen, as the sample and possesses a limit of detection (LoD) of 200 copies of virus per microliter of whole saliva with an analytical sensitivity of 97% and analytical specificity of 100%. The test requires minimal operator training and could be fabricated on a large-scale using roll-to-roll methods. Since the test is based on nucleic acids, the testing platform itself lends to further applications <a>including food safety monitoring, animal diagnostic, etc. simply by changing the specific primers</a>. </p>