Self-collected gargle as a patient-friendly sample collection method for COVID-19 diagnosis in population context

Scaling up SARS-CoV-2 testing and tracing continues to be plagued with limitation of sample collection method that requires trained healthcare workers to perform and cause discomfort to the patients. In response, we assessed the performance and user preference of gargle specimens for qRT-PCR based detection of SARS-CoV-2 in Indonesia. Inpatients who had recently been diagnosed with COVID-19 and outpatients who were about to perform qRT-PCR testing were asked to provide nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal (NPOP) swabs and self-collected gargle specimens. We demonstrated that self-collected gargle specimens can be an alternative specimen to detect SARS-CoV-2 and the viral RNA remained stable for 31 days on room temperature storage. The developed method was validated for use on multiple RNA extraction kit and commercially available COVID-19 RT-PCR kits. Our developed method achieved sensitivity of 91.38% when compared to paired NPOP swab specimens (Ct < 35) with 95.16% of patients prefer the self-collected gargle method.