Implementing diagnostic tools
of COVID-19 infection
The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 outbreak raised critical challenges for public health and sanitary services, medical organization, security and economical fields.
A major weapon to control the pandemic is to detect as soon as possible infected individuals and to implement measures of prevention.
For this purpose, public policies must be conducted on the basis of tools making it possible to assess the real prevalence of the infection, the projection of the immunity acquired by the populations, and the evaluation of measures aimed to break the transmission.
The project ASCENT addresses directly these challenges by introducing two novel assays to evaluate
1 SARS-CoV-2 specific antibodies in the serum of infected individuals
2 Neutralizing capacity of antibody responses
The assays will be implemented in South Africa and Burkina Faso, and applied to cross-sectional observational studies in these countries to generate seroprevalence data.
The “real life” data on seroprevalence will allow the development of models of the epidemics in each collaborating country, and across countries, leading to new insights in the natural history of the infection, clinical care and management of infected individuals in terms of prediction of the establishment of an immunity status at the population level and to estimate the dynamics of the epidemics.
