Performance evaluation of the QIAstat-Dx® Respiratory SARS-CoV-2 Panel

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the QIAstat-Dx((R)) Respiratory SARS-CoV-2 Panel (QIAstatSARS-CoV-2), which is a closed, fully automated, multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay that detects severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and 21 other pathogens that cause respiratory disease. Methods: Nasopharyngeal swabs from patients with or suspected of having coronavirus disease 2019 were collected and tested at Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital, Paris, France. Using the World Health Organisation-approved real-time-PCR assay developed by the Charite Institute of Virology as the reference, positive percent agreement (PPA) and negative percent agreement (NPA) were calculated. Results: In total, 189 negative and 88 positive samples were analyzed. QIAstat-SARS-CoV-2 had an NPA of 90.48% (95% confidence interval (CI), 85.37%, 94.26%) and a PPA of 94.32% (95% CI, 87.24%, 98.13%). Coinfections were detected by QIAstat-SARS-CoV-2 in 4/277 specimens. The methods exhibited comparable failure rates (23/307 [7.5%] vs. 6/298 [2.0%] for QIAstat-SARS-CoV-2 and reference methods, respectively). The turnaround time was shorter for QIAstat-SARS-CoV-2 compared with the reference method (difference in mean -14:30 h [standard error, 0:03:23; 95% CI, -14:37, -14:24]; P < 0.001). Conclusions: QIAstat-SARS-CoV-2 shows good agreement with the reference assay, providing faster and accurate results for detecting SARS-CoV-2. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of International Society for Infectious Diseases. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).