A streamlined approach to rapidly detect SARS-CoV-2 infection, avoiding RNA extraction

Stefania Marzinotto; Catia Mio; Adriana Cifu'; Roberto Verardo; Corrado Pipan; Claudio Schneider; Francesco Curcio

In early 2020, Italy faced the exponential outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 infection originated in China and since declared a pandemic by the WHO, which highly impacted on the healthcare systems around the World and was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Molecular testing for SARS-CoV-2 2 is currently the best available approach for a correct diagnosis and to establish the infective potential of patients. RNA extraction from nasopharyngeal swabs of patients affected by COVID-19 has become a bottleneck in diagnostic procedures due to the enormous quantity of samples to be daily processed and to the shortage in extraction kit availability. In many instances, the shortage has induced the limitation of testing only to patients with symptoms (often non-specific) but in this way many asymptomatic or paucisymptomatic individuals 3,4 have not been tested and have become a major vehicle by which the infection has spread, first in China 5 and then in the rest of the World. To overcome this issue, we set up an in-house protocol to pretreat swab samples before performing RT-qPCR.