Boston, May 7: While the rapid antigen tests remain a useful tool for the detection of COVID-19 infections, some of these diagnostic kits may be less sensitive to the variants of concern, according to a US study.
Scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in the US noted that the rapid tests were developed for use with the original SARS-CoV-2 viral strain that emerged late in 2019.
Since then, the virus has evolved countless times, and several viral variants of concern have emerged, including the highly infectious Delta and Omicron variants that swept across the world last summer and winter respectively.
In the study published in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, the researchers used live virus culture to assess how well four rapid antigen tests are able to detect these COVID-19 variants of concern.