Coronavirus (COVID-19) Collection
Increasing SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR testing capacity by sample pooling
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), continues to impose a heavy burden on healthcare systems worldwide due to a shortage of consumables and demand to ‘scale up’ efficient screening approaches. In order to limit the escalation of cases and amplification of infections, there is a need to increase testing capacity and develop alternatives to the one-step real-time quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) for regular testing of SARS-CoV-2 (Mina et al., 2020).Sensitivity of different RT-qPCR solutions for SARS-CoV-2 detection
The ongoing pandemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causing the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has imposed an increasing demand on daily diagnostic screening. This is expected to perpetuate over the coming months, due to the recurrence of outbreaks and lifting of lockdown measures worldwide (Patel et al., 2020). Given the high sensitivity compared to serological testing (Cassaniti et al., 2020), standard diagnosis continues to rely on RNA extractions from respiratory or oral samples followed by one-step reverse transcription and real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) that entails one or several primer-probe sets for targeting SARS-CoV-2 sequences (Corman et al., 2020).Fast SARS-CoV-2 detection by RT-qPCR in preheated nasopharyngeal swab samples
The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic due to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) worldwide infection ( https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports ) has imposed an unexpected high burden on the health care systems worldwide leading to an increasing demand for daily diagnostic screening. The current standard assay for diagnosis is based on the extraction of RNA from respiratory samples, especially from nasopharyngeal swab viral transport media (VTM), and subsequent one-step reverse transcription and real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) targeting one or several sequences from SARS-CoV-2 (Corman et al.
