Evaluation of transportation means for the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 using clinical samples

Abstract

Introduction: Transportation means are necessary to a proper collection of clinical samples for diagnosis of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and other respiratory viral infections. In order to achieve technological sovereignty, since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, the Cuban National Center for Bioproducts developed and manufactured transportation means for nasopharyngeal swab (NPS) samples that were evaluated at IPK. Methods: The performance of BTU and TAN media, using NPS for detection of SARS-CoV-2 was evaluated with RT-PCR. As indicators of performance, we estimated the difference between Ct values obtained with studied media and reference media (BTV). Moreover, the agreement, the Kappa coefficient, and the stability of NPS samples were evaluated at 48 and 72 hours (h) for BTU, while for TAN this evaluation was followed up to 168 h. Results and discussion: The agreement was almost perfect with samples collected in TAN medium, whereas BTU showed moderate agreement. The stability of samples was 100 % for both mediums at 48 h, decreasing to 85,71 % for BTU medium at 72 h. However, for samples collected in TAN medium the stability was 100 % till 168 h. In contrast, no significant difference was observed regarding Ct between evaluated and reference media. It is concluded that the performance of evaluated media was adequate for SARS-CoV-2 detection using RT-PCR, comparable with BTV reference media. Our recommendation is to extend the evaluation of these media for microbiological diagnosis of other microorganisms.