Sensitivity of rapid antigen tests against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron and Delta variants.

ABSTRACT: Rapid antigen tests (RATs) have become an invaluable tool for combating the COVID-19 pandemic. However, concerns have been raised regarding the ability of existing RATs to effectively detect emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. We compared the performance of 10 commercially available, emergency use authorized RATs against the Delta and Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variants using both individual patient and serially diluted pooled clinical samples. The RATs exhibited lower sensitivity for Omicron samples when using PCR cycle threshold (C_T) value (a rough proxy for RNA concentration) as the comparator. Interestingly, however, they exhibited similar sensitivity for Omicron and Delta samples when using quantitative antigen concentration as the comparator. We further found that the Omicron samples ha

SUBMITTER: Rao A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10654096 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature