Complementary diagnostic approaches for COVID-19

In recent months everyone has become aware of the danger represented by COVID-19, and has accepted drastic restrictions on her/his freedom of movement. At the same time, we have all followed the daily development of statistics concerning the numbers of detected infections and the explanation of pandemic predictive models. What is unknown to the wider public, and often neglected by several professionals as well, is that the data used to monitor the pandemic are not necessarily as reliable as they could be. There are several technical steps that are difficult to standardise at large scale, such as the time and the modality of sampling, the implementation of uniform protocols for RNA amplification, the lack of independent analyses to use as controls. As a result, there is a high rate of false negatives, and non-comparable results from datasets collected at different checkpoints. This proposal wishes to evaluate alternative diagnostics approaches that should be more reproducible and sensitive.