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Review
. 2020 Jul 21;35(Suppl 2):121.
doi: 10.11604/pamj.supp.2020.35.24258. eCollection 2020.

Real-time RT-PCR for COVID-19 diagnosis: challenges and prospects

Waidi Folorunso Sule  1 , Daniel Oladimeji Oluwayelu  2
Affiliations
Review

Real-time RT-PCR for COVID-19 diagnosis: challenges and prospects

Waidi Folorunso Sule et al. Pan Afr Med J. .

Abstract

COVID-19 impacts global public health, economy, education, tourism/hospitality and sports; rapid and accurate testing of clinical samples dictate effective response. So far, the real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) is the assay of choice for COVID-19 diagnosis considering its rapidity and accuracy in informing on active coronavirus (CoV) infection. Presently, several RT-qPCR protocols with differing sensitivity/specificity are used for performing this assay; some of them are known to have generated debatable test results to constitute challenges worthy of consideration. This review provides a critical assessment of various published works on RT-qPCR assays used for COVID-19 diagnosis with their different indicators of positivity i.e., cycle threshold (Ct) cut-off values. Knowledge of diagnostic tests for COVID-19 is still evolving and, as a prospect, underscores the need for local validation of positive-negative Ct cut-off values when establishing RT-qPCR assays for SARS-CoV-2 detection.

Keywords: COVID-19; RT-qPCR; SARS-CoV-2; diagnosis; reliability.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

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