Performance of oropharyngeal swab testing compared to nasopharyngeal swab testing for diagnosis of COVID-19 -United States, January-February 2020

Monita R Patel; Darin Carroll; Emily Ussery; Hilary Whitham; Christopher A Elkins; Judith Noble-Wang; James Kamile Rasheed; Xioayan Lu; Stephen Lindstrom; Virginia Bowen; Jessica Waller; Gregory Armstrong; Susan Gerber; John T Brooks

doi:10.1093/cid/ciaa759

Performance of oropharyngeal swab testing compared to nasopharyngeal swab testing for diagnosis of COVID-19 -United States, January-February 2020

Clin Infect Dis. 2020 Jun 16;ciaa759. doi: 10.1093/cid/ciaa759. Online ahead of print.

Affiliation

¹ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Abstract

Among 146 nasopharyngeal (NP) and oropharyngeal (OP) swab pairs collected ≤7 days since illness onset, CDC real-time RT-PCR SARS-CoV-2 assay diagnostic results were 95.2% concordant. However, NP swab Ct values were lower (indicating more virus) in 66.7% of concordant-positive pairs, suggesting NP swabs may more accurately detect amount of SARS-CoV-2.

Keywords: SARS-CoV-2; coronavirus; cycle threshold values; nasopharyngeal; oropharyngeal; testing.

Published by Oxford University Press for the Infectious Diseases Society of America 2020. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.