An aliquot is taken from a primary sample (nasopharyngeal, oropharyngeal or nasal swab) in transport media as starting material. This is added to an optimized sample preparation buffer, which allows preparation of the viral RNA template without degradation in two minutes, before being combined with an RT-qPCR reaction mix for rapid amplification on any thermocycler using any assay. The output is finally interpreted, delivering test results in under one hour.