A pilot study to investigate the fecal dissemination of SARS-CoV-2 virus genome in COVID-19 patients in Odisha, India

  1. Shantibhusan Senapati
  2. Jaya Singh Kshatri
  3. Punit Prasad
  4. Jyotirmayee Turuk
  5. Sanghamitra Pati
  6. Ajay Parida

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

In infectious diseases, the routes of transmission play major roles in determining the rate and extent of disease spread. Though fomites and aerosol droplets are major sources of SARS-CoV-2 human to human transmission, studies have also reported possible involvement of other routes of transmission like fecal-oral. Multiple studies around the world have reported shedding of the SARS-CoV-2 viral genome in certain COVID-19 patient fecal samples. Hence, the major objective of this study was to get the experimental evidence whether in Indian COVID-19 patients fecal dissemination of the SARS-CoV-2 genome occurs or not. Information obtained from twelve number of patients from a COVID-19 hospital of Odisha has demonstrated that both symptomatic and asymptomatic Indian patients could be positive for the SARS-CoV-2 genome in their fecal component. The findings have also established a protocol to collect and extract viral RNA for SARS-CoV-2 detection in fecal samples. Together, the study supports the hypothesis of possible fecal-oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus and provides a rationale to extend this study in a larger cohort of patient samples and correlate the significance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome detection in fecal samples with disease severity and transmission.

Article activity feed

  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113167: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIACUC: Study design and patients: The study was approved by the Institutional human ethical committee, ILS, Bhubaneswar, and the Govt. of Odisha, India.
    Consent: Informed consent was obtained from all the patients who participated in this study.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results 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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113167 on medRxiv