Clinical Performance and Analytical Sensitivity of Three SARS-CoV-2 Nucleic Acid Diagnostic Tests

Hundreds of RT-qPCR kits are available in the market for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis, some of them with emergency use authorization (EUA) by the Food Drug Administration (FDA) or their country of origin agency, but also many of them without any independent clinical performance evaluation. We performed a clinical evaluation for two Chinese SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR kits available in South America, COVID-19 Nucleic Acid Test Kit (eDiagnosis Biomedicine, Wuhan, China) and 2019-nCoV Nucleic Acid Diagnostic Kit (Sansure Biotech, Changsha, China), for RT-qPCR SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis using the FDA EUA 2019-nCoV CDC kit (IDT, Coralville, IA) as gold standard. We found an excellent clinical performance and analytical sensitivity for both kits with sensitivity values of 100% and 95.3% and estimated limit of detection of 500 copies/mL and 1,000 copies/mL, for eDiagnosis and Sansure Biotech kits, respectively. COVID-19 Nucleic Acid Test Kit (eDiagnosis) and 2019-nCoV Nucleic Acid Diagnostic Kit (Sansure Biotech) are both made in China and hold EUA by the Chinese CDC. Also, Sansure Biotech kit has EUA by the FDA. In conclusion, our results endorse the use of these two commercially available kits imported to Ecuador for SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis, as they had the similar clinical performance as the gold standard from the CDC.