LITERATURE REVIEW: SENSITIVITY AND SPESIFICITY OF qRT PCR METHOD IN DETECTING SARS-COV-2 IN 3 TYPES OF SPECIMEN

Abstract

Introduction: At the end of December 2019, the world was shocked by the emergence of a new virus originating from the city of Wuhan, China. This virus was given the name by the World Health Organization (WHO) namely Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the name of the disease as Coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Until now, there is no specific therapy for SARS-CoV-2 and other anti-coronaviruses. The gold standard method for the examination of SARS-CoV-2 is the Quantitative Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (qRT-PCR) method. The qRT-PCR method has sufficient sensitivity to detect early infection. Methodology: This study used the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method with 2 journals related to the sensitivity and specificity of the qRT-PCR method in detecting SARS-CoV-2. Literature search is done by tracing the results of scientific publications through the PubMed database. Research findings: Clinical samples that were positive for 24 non-SARS-CoV-2 respiratory viruses when tested with the Real Time SARS-CoV-2 test were negative for SARS-CoV-2. The results of nasal swabs samples obtained sensitivity and specificity of 100%, for throat swabs samples obtained sensitivity of 97% and specificity of 100%, for sputum samples had a sensitivity of 94% and specificity of 100%. Conclusions: The sensitivity of the qRT-PCR method is 96% and the specificity of the qRT-PCR method is 100%.