Andreas Osterman, Irina Badell, Christopher Dächert, Nikolas Schneider, Anna-Yasemin Kaufmann, Gamze Naz Öztan, Melanie Huber, Patricia M Späth, Marcel Stern, Hanna Autenrieth, Maximilian Muenchhoff, Alexander Graf, Stefan Krebs, Helmut Blum, Ludwig Czibere, Jürgen Durner, Lars Kaderali, Hanna-Mari Baldauf, Oliver T Keppler
During 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic has been dominated by the variant of concern (VoC) Omicron (B.1.1.529) and its rapidly emerging subvariants, including Omicron-BA.1 and -BA.2. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) are part of national testing strategies to identify SARS-CoV-2 infections on site in a community setting or to support layman's diagnostics at home. We and others have recently demonstrated an impaired RAT detection of infections caused by Omicron-BA.1 compared to Delta. Here, we evaluated the performance of five SARS-CoV-2 RATs in a single-centre laboratory study examining a total of 140 SARS-CoV-2 PCR-positive respiratory swab samples, 70 Omicron-BA...
November 12, 2022: Medical Microbiology and Immunology