The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for advanced therapeutics that are rapid, sensitive, and multiplexed to treat the virus and its variants. One promising technique that has emerged for combating viruses is CRISPR, a genome editing tool that can enable precise and rapid theragnostic with just the knowledge of a microbe’s genome sequence. In this overview, we discuss the different types of CRISPR tools, their mechanisms, and their applicability in detecting viral variants. However, the