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. 2022 Jan;39(1):70-76.
doi: 10.1136/emermed-2021-211814. Epub 2021 Nov 5.

COVID-19 rapid diagnostics: practice review

Charles Reynard  1   2 , Joy A Allen  3   4 , Bethany Shinkins  5 , Graham Prestwich  6 , Johnathan Goves  2 , Kerrie Davies  7   8 , Richard Body  9   2 ; CONDOR group
Collaborators, Affiliations

COVID-19 rapid diagnostics: practice review

Charles Reynard et al. Emerg Med J. 2022 Jan.

Abstract

Point-of-care tests for SARS-CoV-2 could enable rapid rule-in and/or rule-out of COVID-19, allowing rapid and accurate patient cohorting and potentially reducing the risk of nosocomial transmission. As COVID-19 begins to circulate with other more common respiratory viruses, there is a need for rapid diagnostics to help clinicians test for multiple potential causative organisms simultaneously.However, the different technologies available have strengths and weaknesses that must be understood to ensure that they are used to the benefit of the patient and healthcare system. Device performance is related to the deployed context, and the diagnostic characteristics may be affected by user experience.This practice review is written by members of the UK's COVID-19 National Diagnostic Research and Evaluation programme. We discuss relative merits and test characteristics of various commercially available technologies. We do not advocate for any given test, and our coverage of commercially supplied tests is not intended to be exhaustive.

Keywords: COVID-19; diagnosis; emergency department; infectious diseases.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: RB has consulted for Siemens, Roche, Beckman, Singulex, LumiraDx and Abbott but not relating to COVID-19.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Absolute numbers of false negatives and positives in a theoretical sample of 1000 patients with varying diagnostic characteristics and prevalence.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Strengths and weaknesses of each detection technology. *Some direct molecular technologies allow batch testing. Of note, neither technology class has the proven ability to quantify viral load reliably.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Communication pearls for conveying the results of novel COVID-19 diagnostic tests.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

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