This is not an outlet for Abbott Laboratories so much as an acknowledgment of what the company’s new antigen test ($ 5, 15 minutes, simple and highly accurate) represents at the generic level, because it will surely be the first of many similar tests that they promise the same. Low cost. High accuracy. Quick results. The very fact that you are celebrating this reflects what we have had to go through during the last eight months of the coronavirus disease. Complex testing (either in terms of testing or experience requirements). Slow tests. And tests that are inaccurate. That’s the kind of tradeoffs that even people who understand testing have had to make. As for those who don’t, one test is just as good as another, a behavior exemplified by the Union Ministry of Health and the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), both of which should know better, without bothering to enforce. , or even issue guidelines on when the test type should be used.
Antigen tests have been around for some time. They have always been relatively inexpensive. And they have always been fast. But they were also inaccurate when it came to so-called false negatives or showing infected people as not infected. This low specificity (the technical term for what are called true negatives, which means that someone identified as uninfected in the test is not actually infected) made them unreliable. Around the world, researchers, healthcare workers and legislators insisted that the correct way to use them (if they were to be used) was to follow up a negative test with another antigen test or, preferably, a molecular test like the reverse. . Transcription polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, one.
When time is a limitation, the use of antigen testing makes sense. For example, they can help quickly isolate infected people into containment zones or virus hotspots. Where it is not, molecular testing should be used.
The fact that most of the early antigen tests for Covid-19 were unreliable was concerning, but expected. Most of the people (including this writer) were convinced that the problem was temporary.
Science (and Big Pharma) is sure to find an answer to this: Testing is an area in which we have made great progress over the years. Ergo, it was only a matter of time before companies started releasing accurate antigen tests. Now we have one. And there is a very high probability that there are many more. We can even have molecular tests that give results in an hour.
Based on clinical studies, the specificity and sensitivity (ability to identify true positives or an infected person as infected) of the Abbott antigen test is on par with molecular tests such as RT-PCR. For those interested in the details, the sensitivity of the Abbott test is 97.1% and the specificity is 98.5%. That’s a huge leap from the previous generation of antigen tests.
However, there is a caveat: the field performance of any test, even RT-PCR, rarely matches its clinical performance. There have been a few high-profile cases of RT-PCR tests that have failed (and that’s to be expected; some of them going wrong is a mathematical possibility).
Still, the new antigen test (currently released for the US only), and those that will invariably follow, provide a near-perfect solution for testing. And by providing accurate results early (antigen tests used in India provide results in an hour, but they are not very accurate) they can help isolate infected people, regulate entry to offices, schools and universities, public places and public events basically play a key role in the return to normality.
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