Last, our analysis found that a short heat treatment of 5 min at 95°C, which poses minimal additional handling steps, did not destroy the RNA but rather stabilized it and this improved the sensitivity and specificity of the swab–to–RT-LAMP assay (Fig. 5). The heat likely helped to homogenize the sample, to inactivate ribonucleases (RNAses), and to break up the viral capsid to release the viral RNA. Overall, our data demonstrate the feasibility of using a swab–to–RT-LAMP test and suggest applications especially in scenarios where RNA isolation is not available, e.g., in resource-poor settings. In such cases, the hot swab–to–RT-LAMP assay seems a good option given that the direct swab–to–RT-LAMP assay yields a number of false positives due to spurious amplification (14).