Cotton-Tipped Plastic Swabs for SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR Diagnosis to Prevent Supply Shortages
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.28.20079947: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistics: For statistical analysis of Ct values, t-student test was performed using Excel. Excelsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The main limitation of the study is the relative small sample size that would explain the 100% …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.28.20079947: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistics: For statistical analysis of Ct values, t-student test was performed using Excel. Excelsuggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:The main limitation of the study is the relative small sample size that would explain the 100% agreement among swabs. However, we believe that a potential disagreement among swabs on a bigger sample size study would be related to variability associated to sampling procedure more than to the type of swabs. While our results show that cotton does not inhibit the detection of SARS-COV2, previous work has shown inhibition by the chemicals in the wood stem of some swabs. This may explain why inexpensive cotton swabs have been excluded from CDC and WHO guidelines for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis (1,3). However, the use of cotton tipped swabs for respiratory specimen collection is included at WHO general guidelines for respiratory specimen collection (2) and it has been reported specifically reliable for respiratory retroviruses like influenza (6). Plastic cotton tipped swabs are cheap and made worldwide, even in developing countries like Ecuador. Including this type of swab on international guidelines upon more independent validation studies would help to prevent SARS-CoV2 diagnosis disruption due to swab supply shortage as recently happened in Ecuador, while keeping high standards for sensitivity and specificity. To our knowledge, this is the the second study comparing swabs for SARS-CoV2 testing (7), but the first study suggesting that inexpensive, readily available cotton swabs could serve as a practical alternative to more costly, imported rayon swab. Additionally, high sensitivity was...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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