There is a need for development of an analytical method for rapid detection of SARS-CoV-2 virus which is causing the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently available traditional tissue/cell culture-based analytical method is too laborious and takes several days to get the results on the presence/absence of viable/infectious virus in a sample. Such a delay in getting the sample analysis results can be a serious obstacle in rapidly determining the presence of infectious virus in environment which, in turn, can impact environmental epidemiological investigations and studies on surface transmission of this virus. In this manuscript, development of a Rapid Viability Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RV-RT-PCR) method that can significantly reduce the time-to-results for sample analysis from several days to less than a day is described. The RV-RT-PCR method integrates cell-culture based enrichment of the virus with virus-specific RT-PCR analysis. The RTPCR analysis is conducted before and after the cell-culture-virus (sample) incubation. An optimum algorithm is established such that the resultant RT-PCR cycle threshold (CT) value difference between before and after cell-culture-virus incubation RT-PCR analyses determines the presence of viable/infectious virus in the sample. The data set included here is from this research work. A manuscript has also been included here along with the Supplemental Tables for additional data. The Data-Metadata file includes all the data and a glossary to explain the scientific terms used.

This dataset is associated with the following publication: Shah, S., S. Kane, M. Elsheikh, and T. Alfaro. Development of a Rapid Viability RT-PCR (RV-RT-PCR) Method to Detect Infectious SARS-CoV-2 from Swabs. JOURNAL OF VIROLOGICAL METHODS. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, USA, 297: 114251, (2021).