DIAGNOSIS OF COVID-19: DRY VERSUS WET SWAB TECHNIQUE

Narang S., Jaiswal N.*, Thakkar J., Karicheri R., Jatav K. and Srivastava R.

ABSTRACT

Currently, people all over the world have been suffering due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is the fifth pandemic after the Spanish Flu pandemic occurred in 1918. The symptomatology of those patients, including fever, malaise, dry cough, and dyspnea, was diagnosed as viral infection. There have been recent advances in methods for detection of the COVID-19 out of which; the most sensitive method is real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). For any RT-PCR test, the first step is extraction of nucleic acid (Sample Extraction) which is achieved by spin column and magnetic beads based extraction. These methods have prominent drawbacks such as prolonged turn-around time, consumption of resources and tedious mass handling of samples in laboratory. We have presented a novel method of extraction known as The Dry swab test. In this article, we have compared both, the conventional spin column of extraction with dry swab extraction method. The Dry swab method was equivalent with spin column methods for isolation of total RNA from patient samples.

Keywords: RT-PCR, COVID-19, SARS CoV-2, Dry Swab, RNA Extraction.