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Review
. 2021 Mar 17;21(1):212.
doi: 10.1186/s12884-021-03653-4.

Samba II PCR testing for COVID-19 in pregnant women: a retrospective cohort study and literature review

Ruiling Xu  1 , Tara Alicia Pauley  1 , Hannah Missfelder-Lobos  1 , Richard John Haddon  2 , Ravindra Kumar Gupta  3 , Hsu Phern Chong  4
Affiliations
Review

Samba II PCR testing for COVID-19 in pregnant women: a retrospective cohort study and literature review

Ruiling Xu et al. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth. .

Abstract

Background: Asymptomatic carriage of COVID-19 in pregnant women has been reported and could lead to outbreaks in maternity units. We sought to ascertain the impact of rapid isothernal nucleic acid based testing for COVID-19 in an unselected cohort of pregnant women attending our maternity unit. We also assessed the correlation between community prevalence and asymptomatic carriage.

Methods: Data for the retrospective cohort study were collected from a large UK tertiary maternity unit over a 4-week period using computerised hospital records. Literature searches were performed across multiple repositories. COVID-19 prevalence was extracted from online repositories.

Results: Nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs were obtained from 457/465 (98%) women during the study period. The median turnaround time for results was 5.3 h (interquartile range (IQR) 2.6-8.9 h), with 92% of the results returned within 24 h. In our cohort, only one woman tested positive, giving a screen positive rate of 0.22% (1/457; 95% CI: 0.04-1.23%). One woman who tested negative developed a fever postnatally following discharge but was lost to follow-up. From our literature review, we did not find any correlation between asymptomatic carriage in pregnant women and the reported regional prevalence of COVID-19.

Conclusions: Testing using the SAMBA-II machine was acceptable to the vast majority of pregnant women requiring admission and had a low turnaround time. Asymptomatic carriage is low, but not correlated to community prevalence rates. Screening pregnant women on admission will remain an important component in order to minimise nosocomial infection.

Keywords: COVID-19; Pregnancy; SARS-CoV-2; Universal screening.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years, no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. Completed disclosure of interest forms are available to view online as supporting information.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Results turnaround times (TAT) from 432 SARS-CoV-2 testing samples, using SAMBA II for in-hospital testing
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Relationship between prevalence of COVID-19 in pregnant women and published peak prevalence. Data from Table 1 was used to generate Figure 2. Simple linear regression was performed to investigate the relationship between the prevalence of COVID-19 in pregnant women and peak daily community prevalence at three time points: the start of the study interval the maximum reported daily prevalence and the prevalence at the end of the study interval. The scatter plots demonstrated a positive correlation with the maximum reported daily prevalence rates during the study interval (R2 = 0.41, p = 0.0053) and towards the end of the study period (R2 = 0.48, p = 0.002) but not with rates at the start (R2 = 0.004, p = 0.82)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Relationship between asymptomatic carriage of COVID-19 in pregnant women and local peak prevalence. Data from Table 1 was used to generate Figure 3. Simple linear regression was performed to investigate the relationship between the prevalence of COVID-19 in pregnant women and peak daily community prevalence at three time points: the start of the study interval, during and end of the study interval. The scatter plots demonstrated no correlation with the maximum reported daily prevalence rates at the start (R2 = 0.04, p = 0.44), during (R2 = 0.01, p = 0.65) and end of the study intervals (R2 = 0.02, p = 0.62)
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