A Performance Assessment Study of Different Clinical Samples for Rapid COVID-19 Antigen Diagnosis Tests.

Accurate diagnosis to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is crucial for the clinical management of this lethal infection. Recently, many low-cost and easy-to-use rapid test kits (RTK) have been developed in many countries for the massive screening of SARS-CoV-2. Thus, evaluating the accuracy and reliability of an RTK is critical.

Performance Validation of COVID-19 Self-Conduct Buccal and Nasal Swabs RTK-Antigen Diagnostic Kit.

The antigen rapid diagnostic test (Ag-RDT) is an immunodiagnostic test that detects the presence of viral proteins (antigens) expressed by the COVID-19 virus in a sample from a patient's respiratory tract. This study focused on evaluating the performance of self-conduct buccal and nasal swabs RTK-antigen test compared to nasopharyngeal swab RTK-based COVID-19 diagnostic assays, Panbio™ COVID-19 Ag Rapid Test Device (Nasopharyngeal) (Abbott Rapid Diagnostics Jena GmbH, Jena, Germany) used in hospitals for first-line screening. The sensitivity and specificity of the paired RTK-Ag test in detecting the an-tigen were calculated at 96.