Prospects of biotechnological production and adoption of COVID-19 serological assays in Nigeria

摘要

For over 8 months of its emergence, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted to unprecedented global health challenge and economic uncertainties. Till date, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) as the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis. As at 30th August 2020, there were 53727 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 cases out of the 398304 tested persons in Nigeria [1]. Even though the government of Nigeria has been activating some laboratories to scale-up its testing capacity, many observers have attributed the relatively low reported COVID-19 cases to underdiagnosis, probably due to inadequate molecular diagnostic capacity and few human resources skilled in molecular diagnostic tests [2]. Although appropriate use of RT-PCR provides very accurate results, test reagents and consumables are mostly in short supply. Besides, this protocol is laborious, expensive to operate and has a long test turnaround time (TAT) [3]. Aside from these, one of the major technical drawbacks in the use of RT-PCR includes significant cases of false-negative results despite patients having clinical features and radiologic findings highly suspicious of SARS-CoV-2 infection [4]. This could have been due to wrong sampling where SARS-CoV-2 might have been present in the lower respiratory tracts rather than upper respiratory samples often collected for laboratory diagnosis. This poses a challenge in the proper evaluation of some SARS-CoV-2 infected persons.