A Highly Scalable and Rapidly Deployable RNA Extraction-Free COVID-19 Assay by Quantitative Sanger Sequencing

Devon Chandler-Brown; Anna M. Bueno; Oguzhan Atay; David S. Tsao

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most deadly and disruptive public health emergencies that we have had to face in the last hundred years. To curb its rapid spread, most countries issued shelter-in-place rules which were able to flatten the pandemic curve, but at a significant economic cost [10] . Social distancing interventions can only be relaxed if a vaccine is developed, which is estimated to take 12 months to develop and widely distribute, or after widespread and rapid testing can be performed on symptomatic patients as well as anyone who has been identified as likely to have come into contact with those who test positive [11] . This suggests that for effective contact tracing, up to 50 additional people may need to be tested for each positive case. However, on April 6, 2020, the US daily testing capacity was only~100,000 to~125,000 tests when 30,000 patients tested positive [12] . This suggests that US testing capacity might need to be increased by a factor of 10x or more for effective contact tracing. However, most COVID-19 tests that are currently available rely on variations on qPCR and thus author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.