1887

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Volume 72, Issue 10

Rapid response of a public health reference laboratory to the COVID-19 pandemic Open Access

Abstract

Brazil was one of the most affected countries by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instituto Adolfo Lutz (IAL) is the reference laboratory for COVID-19 in São Paulo, the most populous state in Brazil. In April 2020, a secondary diagnostic pole named IAL-2 was created to enhance IAL’s capacity for COVID-19 diagnosis.

Public health laboratories must be prepared to rapidly respond to emerging epidemics or pandemics.

To describe the design of IAL-2 and correlate the results of RT-qPCR tests for COVID-19 with secondary data on suspected cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the São Paulo state.

This is a retrospective study based on the analysis of secondary data from patients suspected of infection by SARS-CoV-2 whose clinical samples were submitted to real-time PCR after reverse transcription (RT-qPCR) at IAL-2, between 1 April 2020 and 8 March 2022. RT-qPCR Ct results of the different kits used were also analysed.

IAL-2 was implemented in April 2020, just over a month after the detection of the first COVID-19 case in Brazil. The laboratory performed 304,250 RT-qPCR tests during the study period, of which 98 319 (32.3 %) were positive, 205827 (67.7 %) negative, and 104 (0.03 %) inconclusive for SARS-CoV-2. RT-qPCR Ct values≤30 for E/N genes of SARS-CoV-2 were presented by 79.7 % of all the samples included in the study.

IAL was able to rapidly implement a new laboratory structure to support the processing of an enormous number of samples for diagnosis of COVID-19, outlining strategies to carry out work with quality, using different RT-qPCR protocols.

  • Received:
  • Accepted:
  • Published Online:
Keyword(s): COVID-19 , laboratories , public health , real-time polymerase chain reaction , reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction and SARS-CoV-2
© 2023 The Authors
  • This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The Microbiology Society waived the open access fees for this article.
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2023-10-06
2024-04-28
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Rapid response of a public health reference laboratory to the COVID-19 pandemic
J. Med. Microbiol. 72, 001757 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1099/jmm.0.001757
/content/journal/jmm/10.1099/jmm.0.001757
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