Smartphone Screen Testing, a novel pre-diagnostic method to identify SARS-CoV-2 infectious individuals
- Institute of Ophthalmology, UCL, United Kingdom
- Diagnosis Biotech, Chile
- Grupo Oncológico Cooperativo Chileno de Investigación, Chile
- Clínica Dávila, Chile
- Clinica Davila, Chile
- University of Chile, Chile
- Faculty of Chemistry and Biology, University of Santiago of Chile, Chile
- Great Ormond Street Hospital National Health Service Foundation Trust, Chile
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic will likely take years to control globally, and constant epidemic surveillance will be required to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2, especially considering the emergence of new variants that could hamper the effect of vaccination efforts. We developed a simple and robust - Phone Screen Testing (PoST) - method to detect positive SARS-CoV-2 individuals by RT-PCR testing of smartphone screen swab samples. We show that 81.3-100% of individuals with high-viral load SARS-CoV-2 nasopharyngeal positive samples also test positive for PoST, suggesting this method is effective in identifying COVID-19 contagious individuals. Furthermore, we successfully identified polymorphisms associated with SARS-CoV-2 Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants, in SARS-CoV-2 positive PoST samples. Overall, we report that PoST is a new non-invasive, cost-effective, and easy to implement smartphone-based smart alternative for SARS-CoV-2 testing, which could help to contain COVID-19 outbreaks and identification of variants of concern in the years to come.
Data availability
All the data used generated by this study was provided in the uploaded manuscript and source files.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Moorfields Eye Charity (Career Development Award 001155)
- Rodrigo M Young
Moorfields Eye Charity (Springboard Award GR001210)
- Rodrigo M Young
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid0789)
- Luis A Quiñones
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid1038)
- Ana M Sandino
Agencia Nacional de Investigacion y Desarrollo Chile (ANID-Covid1038)
- Ana M Sandino
Fondecyt (1211841)
- Felipe Reyes-Lopez
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Joshua T Schiffer, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, United States
Ethics
Human subjects: Informed consent and consent to publish was obtained from all the individuals that participated in this study before performing the sampling process. This has been made explicit in the materials and methods section of the article. Ethical approval was obtained by the Ethics and Scientific Committee of Clinica Davila (Santiago, Chile) under the approval titled: "Identificación de marcadores de riesgo asociados a la severidad del Covid-19 en el microbioma respiratorio".
Version history
- Received: May 16, 2021
- Accepted: June 21, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: June 22, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: July 12, 2021 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2021, Young et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Smartphone Screen Testing, a novel pre-diagnostic method to identify SARS-CoV-2 infectious individuals
eLife 10:e70333.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70333
Further reading
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Mobile phones could be used to test for COVID-19
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