Proposal of Reverse Transcription-PCR –Based Mass Population Screening for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

Testing for SARS-CoV-2 has lagged behind in many countries due to lack of adequate test kits and bottlenecks in the analytical process. The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility and accuracy of a sample pooling approach for wide-scale population screening for COVID-19. A total of 940 nasopharyngeal-swab samples (934 negative and 6 positive) previously tested for SARS-CoV-2 were de-identified and assigned random numbers for analysis. From this, 94 pools of 10 samples each were created.

Source: Journal of Molecular Diagnostics - July 28, 2020 Category: Pathology Authors: Nikhil Shri Sahajpal, Ashis K. Mondal, Allan Njau, Sudha Ananth, Kimya Jones, Pankaj K. Ahluwalia, Meenakshi Ahluwalia, Yasmeen Jilani, Alka Chaubey, Madhuri Hegde, Vamsi Kota, Amyn Rojiani, Ravindra Kolhe Source Type: research