Multiple assays in a real-time RT-PCR SARS-CoV-2 panel can mitigate the risk of loss of sensitivity by new genomic variants during the COVID-19 outbreak.

CONCLUSIONS: This analysis stresses the importance of targeting more than one region in the viral genome for SARS-CoV-2 detection to mitigate the risk of loss of sensitivity due to the unknown mutation rate during this SARS-CoV-2 outbreak.INTRODUCTIONSince the beginning of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak in December 2019 (Zhu et al., 2020), the number of confirmed cases has been rising dramatically (The Open Science Prize, 2020). According to data from the World Health Organization (WHO), Coronavirus Disease 2019 or COVID-19 (Gorbalenya et al., 2020) has been diagnosed in over 6,057,853 people from more than 200 countries or territories and caused over 371,166 deaths worldwide as of 1 June 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020a).SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans and it appears to have its origin from zoonotic transmission similar to SARS-CoV (2002) and MERS-CoV (2012) (Andersen et al., 2020). SARS-CoV-2 is hypothesised to be the product of recombination or mutation from a genetically related SARS-CoV species hosted by bats (Sun et al., 2020). Unlike seasonal human coronaviruses HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E which are associated with mild symptoms (Corman et al., 2018), SARS-CoV-2 can cause pneumonia and severe acute respiratory syndrome (Andersen et al., 2020). All coronaviruses are single, positive-stranded RNA viruses with similar genomic ∼30kb size and structure. These genes encode non-structural proteins (...
Source: Euro Surveill - Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Tags: Int J Infect Dis Source Type: research