Alternative swab for SARS-CoV-2 screening study

Since its appearance in early December of 2019, COVID-19 has continued to be a growing pandemic and the United States and European nations in particular have experienced unprecedented, dramatic tolls on their economy. As the push continues to re-open economies, the needs for containment, increased testing, and contact tracing of individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 remain essential. Despite the large scale of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, uncertainty persists regarding the mechanisms by which SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted. Determining the role of fomites in the transmission of COVID-19 is essential in the hospital setting and will likely be important outside of medical facilities as governments around the world make plans to ease COVID-19 public health restrictions and attempt to safely reopen economies. Expanding COVID-19 testing to include environmental surfaces both in the hospital environment and out-of-hospital setting would ideally be performed with inexpensive swabs which could be transported safely without the fear of being a source of new infections. However, clinical-grade sampling supplies are expensive and challenging to deploy at population-wide scales. To this end, we performed a series of experiments evaluating and comparing the diagnostic yield of various consumer grade swabs stored in 95% ethanol rather than viral transport medium to detect SARS-CoV-2 in the environment from twenty hospital rooms that housed COVID-19 patients.