Young, RM;
Solis-Cascante, CJ;
Barriga-Fehrman, A;
Abogabir, C;
Thadani, AR;
Labarca, M;
Bustamante, E;
... Quiñones, LA; + view all
(2021)
Smartphone Screen Testing, a novel pre-diagnostic method to identify SARS-CoV-2 infectious individuals.
eLife
, 10
10.7554/elife.70333.
(In press).
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic will likely take years to control globally, and constant epidemic surveillance will be required to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, especially considering the emergence of new variants that could hamper the effect of vaccination efforts. We developed a simple and robust - Phone Screen Testing (PoST) - method to detect positive SARS-CoV-2 individuals by RT-PCR testing of smartphone screen swab samples. We show that 81.3-100% of individuals with high-viral load SARS-CoV-2 nasopharyngeal positive samples also test positive for PoST, suggesting this method is effective in identifying COVID-19 contagious individuals. Furthermore, we successfully identified polymorphisms associated with SARS-CoV-2 Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants, in SARS-CoV-2 positive PoST samples. Overall, we report that PoST is a new non-invasive, cost-effective, and easy to implement smartphone-based smart alternative for SARS-CoV-2 testing, which could help to contain COVID-19 outbreaks and identification of variants of concern in the years to come.
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