J Med Virol . Evaluation of transport media for laboratory detection of SARS-CoV-2 in upper respiratory tract swab specimens

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J Med Virol


. 2020 Oct 31.
doi: 10.1002/jmv.26643. Online ahead of print.
Evaluation of transport media for laboratory detection of SARS-CoV-2 in upper respiratory tract swab specimens


Yvonne Penrod ¹ , Denise Garcia ¹ , S Terence Dunn ¹



Affiliations

• PMID: 33128389
• DOI: 10.1002/jmv.26643

Abstract

The reduced availability of commercial swabs and transport media for testing and administrative demands for increased testing capacity during the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) public health emergency has seriously challenged national laboratory testing programs, forcing many to use non-traditional collection devices, often without typical analytical assessment of their suitability in testing. Five common transport media (four commercial and one in-house) were evaluated for their suitability in the collection of nasopharyngeal swab specimens for subsequent molecular detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome-associated coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Results suggest that these transport media provide dependable temporal stability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus without significant analytical interference of molecular assays. These findings are important for addressing critical laboratory supply chain shortages of transport media in the current COVID-19 health crisis but also for future pandemic planning, when again supplies of choice commercially-available transport media likely will be depleted. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Keywords: 2019 novel coronavirus; SARS-CoV-2; coronavirus; molecular detection; transport media