Rigorous testing is the way forward to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Here we show that the currently used and most reliable RT-PCR based SARS-CoV-2 procedure can be further simplified to make it faster, safer and economical by bypassing the RNA isolation step. The modified method is not only fast and convenient but also at par with the traditional method in terms of accuracy, and therefore, can be used for mass screening. Our method takes about half the time and is cheaper by about 40% compared to current most widely used method. We also provide a variant of the new method that increases the efficiency of detection by about 20% compared to the currently used method. Taken together, we demonstrate a more effective and reliable method of SARS-CoV-2 detection.

中文翻译：

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使用干棉签中的TE提取物改进和简化Covid-19的诊断

严格的测试是应对Covid-19大流行的方法。在这里，我们表明，通过绕过RNA分离步骤，可以进一步简化当前使用的，最可靠的基于RT-PCR的SARS-CoV-2程序，使其更快，更安全，更经济。改进后的方法不仅快速方便，而且在准确性方面与传统方法相当，因此可用于大规模筛选。与目前使用最广泛的方法相比，我们的方法花费了大约一半的时间，并且便宜了约40％。我们还提供了新方法的一种变体，与当前使用的方法相比，该方法将检测效率提高了约20％。综上所述，我们展示了一种更有效，更可靠的SARS-CoV-2检测方法。