Rapid point-of-care testing for SARS-CoV-2 in a community screening setting shows low sensitivity

OBJECTIVE: With the current SARS-CoV2 outbreak, countless tests need to be performed on potential symptomatic individuals, contacts and travellers. The gold standard is a quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR)–based system taking several hours to confirm positivity. For effective public health containment measures, this time span is too long. We therefore evaluated a rapid test in a high-prevalence community setting. STUDY DESIGN: Thirty-nine randomly selected individuals at a COVID-19 screening centre were simultaneously tested via qPCR and a rapid test. Ten previously diagnosed individuals with known SARS-CoV-2 infection were also analysed. METHODS: The evaluated rapid test is an IgG/IgM–based test for SARS-CoV-2 with a time to result of 20 min. Two drops of blood are needed for the test performance. RESULTS: Of 49 individuals, 22 tested positive by repeated qPCR. In contrast, the rapid test detected only eight of those positive correctly (sensitivity: 36.4%). Of the 27 qPCR-negative individuals, 24 were detected correctly (specificity: 88.9%). CONCLUSION: Given the low sensitivity, we recommend not to rely on an antibody-based rapid test for public health measures such as community screenings.