ABSTRACT
Introduction: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious with speed transmission and cause pandemic around the globe. A real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has become the major diagnostic method for COVID-19. Some believe that releasing patient from isolation or evaluating clinical progression could be made based on cycle threshold (CT) values. Here, we aimed to compare CT-value to the clinical insight using three different PCR's kit. Method: We collected 48 patients with confirmed COVID19 positive, then we divided into three groups that were (1) pneumonia, (2) non-pneumonia and (3) asymptomatic. The specimens came from nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs, were extracted using the same matrix column method and then detected by RT-PCR using different kit. The kits were commercially that detect Orf1ab, E gene (kit A);Orf1ab, N, E gene (kit B) and Orf1ab, N gene (kit C). Thus, we compared the result using comparation analysis based on CT-value and clinical groups by using SPSS 20.0 Result: From those patients there were 23 asymptomatic (48%), 9 symptomatic non-pneumonia (19%) and 16 pneumonia cases (33%) respectively. The mean difference of CT-values within three kits were wide and convergence. There were also significantly different (Kruskal-Wallis Test) between clinical course and CT-value in three PCR's kit even from the same detected gene (p< 0.005). Conclusion: This study conclude that CT-value cannot be the only determination to exclude patient from the isolation or to predict the clinical manifestation in COVID-19 since it has wide variation within same sample in different PCR kits. © 2022 UPM Press. All rights reserved.