PLoS One . A novel strategy for community screening of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19): Sample pooling method

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PLoS One


. 2020 Aug 28;15(8):e0238417.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238417. eCollection 2020.
A novel strategy for community screening of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19): Sample pooling method


Khai Lone Lim ¹ , Nur Alia Johari ¹ , Siew Tung Wong ² , Loke Tim Khaw ² , Boon Keat Tan ³ , Kok Keong Chan ³ , Shew Fung Wong ^{2 4} , Wan Ling Elaine Chan ¹ , Nurul Hanis Ramzi ¹ , Patricia Kim Chooi Lim ^{1 2} , Sulaiman Lokman Hakim ^{4 5} , Kenny Voon ²



Affiliations

• PMID: 32857823
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238417

Abstract

The rapid global spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has inflicted significant health and socioeconomic burden on affected countries. As positive cases continued to rise in Malaysia, public health laboratories experienced an overwhelming demand for COVID-19 screening. The confirmation of positive cases of COVID-19 has solely been based on the detection of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) using real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). In efforts to increase the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of COVID-19 screening, we evaluated the feasibility of pooling clinical Nasopharyngeal/Oropharyngeal (NP/OP) swab specimens during nucleic acid extraction without a reduction in sensitivity of qRT-PCR. Pools of 10 specimens were extracted and subsequently tested by qRT-PCR according to the WHO-Charit? protocol. We demonstrated that the sample pooling method showed no loss of sensitivity. The effectiveness of the pooled testing strategy was evaluated on both retrospective and prospective samples, and the results showed a similar detection sensitivity compared to testing individual sample alone. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using a pooled testing strategy to increase testing capacity and conserve resources, especially when there is a high demand for disease testing.