One day, people will be able to buy a ‘lab in a suitcase’, and use it to test their viruses at home or when travelling abroad or anywhere. It could be a great way to prevent the spread of viral epidemics. No, it is not available yet, but it might be for the next outbreak, if the Oxford Nanopore device manufacturers make the end-to-end testing workflow easy and the price affordable.

A group of scientists from the ARTIC group are working with Oxford Nanopore to sequence the coronavirus COVID-19 in real-time, contributing to a rapid 8-hour end-to-end workflow.  Currently, once a sample is received by a laboratory, and that may also take time, it takes 24 hours to get a result, 24-48 hours in some locations.

In January, Oxford Nanopore noted that it had sent 200 of their portable MinION devices to China, to enable the rapid, local sequencing of the coronavirus COVID-19 .

The scientists from universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, Cambridge, Oxford, KU Leuven, UCLA and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre, had previously developed and delivered ‘lab in a suitcase’ sequencing resources/solutions and collaborative local training in multiple outbreaks including Ebola, Zika virus and Yellow Fever.

What if people could test their coronavirus COVID-19 at home? How would it have changed the current outbreak and epidemic pattern?

According to Trevor Bedford, in a phylogenetic analysis published yesterday, he estimates between 80-1500 cases of coronavirus in the Snohomish County in Washington State, much more than currently reported. He states:

Community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected

Because the coronavirus mutates twice per month it can be deduced that the second “community case” in Snohomish County was infected by a virus that is a direct descendant of the virus brought in by a traveler returning from China. Therefore, if instead, people had the ability to self-test and know, in just 8 hours, that they have the virus, they could self-isolate themselves to prevent spreading the infections to others, or see a doctor if they are in the high risk group and symptoms appear. Epidemics such as the current one could be prevented from spreading all over the world.