Economic policy

Outbreak

Public health

Pathology

Business

Virology

Workflow

Coronavirus

Betacoronavirus

Disease

European union

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus

2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Computer science

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Medicine

Database

Biology

Eurosurveillance

The ongoing outbreak of the recently emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) poses a challenge for public health laboratories as virus isolates are unavailable while there is growing evidence that the outbreak is more widespread than initially thought, and international spread through travellers does already occur.We aimed to develop and deploy robust diagnostic methodology for use in public health laboratory settings without having virus material available.Here we present a validated diagnostic workflow for 2019-nCoV, its design relying on close genetic relatedness of 2019-nCoV with SARS coronavirus, making use of synthetic nucleic acid technology.The workflow reliably detects 2019-nCoV, and further discriminates 2019-nCoV from SARS-CoV. Through coordination between academic and public laboratories, we confirmed assay exclusivity based on 297 original clinical specimens containing a full spectrum of human respiratory viruses. Control material is made available through European Virus Archive - Global (EVAg), a European Union infrastructure project.The present study demonstrates the enormous response capacity achieved through coordination of academic and public laboratories in national and European research networks.

Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR