Emily
Editor, Senior Moderator
The dark side of SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen testing: screening asymptomatic patients.
Giorgia Caruana, Laure-Line Lebrun, Oriane Aebischer, Onya Opota, Luis Urbano, Mikael DeRham, Oscar Marchetti, Gilbert Greub
medRxiv 2021.04.24.21256040; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.24.21256040 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
Abstract
Most of the reports describing SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests (RATs) performances derive from COVID-19 symptomatic subjects in outpatient settings during periods of highest incidence of infections and high rates of hospital admissions. Here we investigated the role of RATs in an Emergency Department, as a screening tool before admission for COVID-19 asymptomatic patients. Each patient was screened with two simultaneous nasopharyngeal swabs: one immediately analyzed at the bedside using RAT and the other sent to the laboratory for RT-PCR analysis. A total of 116 patients were screened at hospital admission in a 250-bed community hospital in Morges (EHC), Switzerland. With a disease prevalence of 6% based on RT-PCR results, RAT detected only two out of seven RT-PCR positive patients (sensitivity 28.6%) and delivered two false positive results (specificity 98.2%), thus resulting not fiable enough to be used as a screening method in this clinical scenario.
Giorgia Caruana, Laure-Line Lebrun, Oriane Aebischer, Onya Opota, Luis Urbano, Mikael DeRham, Oscar Marchetti, Gilbert Greub
medRxiv 2021.04.24.21256040; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.24.21256040 This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
Abstract
Most of the reports describing SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen tests (RATs) performances derive from COVID-19 symptomatic subjects in outpatient settings during periods of highest incidence of infections and high rates of hospital admissions. Here we investigated the role of RATs in an Emergency Department, as a screening tool before admission for COVID-19 asymptomatic patients. Each patient was screened with two simultaneous nasopharyngeal swabs: one immediately analyzed at the bedside using RAT and the other sent to the laboratory for RT-PCR analysis. A total of 116 patients were screened at hospital admission in a 250-bed community hospital in Morges (EHC), Switzerland. With a disease prevalence of 6% based on RT-PCR results, RAT detected only two out of seven RT-PCR positive patients (sensitivity 28.6%) and delivered two false positive results (specificity 98.2%), thus resulting not fiable enough to be used as a screening method in this clinical scenario.