Performance of Oropharyngeal Swab Testing Compared With Nasopharyngeal Swab Testing for Diagnosis of Coronavirus Disease 2019—United States, January 2020–February 2020. (16th June 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Patel, Monita R; Carroll, Darin; Ussery, Emily; Whitham, Hilary; Elkins, Christopher A; Noble-Wang, Judith; Rasheed, James Kamile; Lu, Xiaoyan; Lindstrom, Stephen; Bowen, Virginia; Waller, Jessica; Armstrong, Gregory; Gerber, Susan; Brooks, John T
• Is Part Of: Clinical infectious diseases. Volume 72:Number 3(2021)
• Page Start: 482
• Page End: 485
• Publication Date: 2020-06-16
• Subjects: coronavirus -- nasopharyngeal -- oropharyngeal -- testing -- SARS-CoV-2; Communicable diseases -- Periodicals; 616.905
• DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciaa759
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1058-4838

Abstract

Abstract: Among 146 nasopharyngeal (NP) and oropharyngeal (OP) swab pairs collected ≤7 days after illness onset, Real-Time Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction assay for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR) diagnostic results were 95.2% concordant. However, NP swab cycle threshold values were lower (indicating more virus) in 66.7% of concordant-positive pairs, suggesting NP swabs may more accurately detect the amount of SARS-CoV-2.