It’s good news that Covid-19 rapid tests are being tried out in Bahrain, ‘Rapid tests trial’ (GDN, October 14).
With the winter season looming, health officials are desperately pursuing more options to help curb the spread of the coronavirus disease, with Covid-19 expected to remain a part of our lives for the foreseeable future.
The rapid antigen Covid-19 test, which can produce results within minutes, are being used to quickly diagnose and trace those infected.
Though much faster than the “gold standard” polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, it is also less sensitive than the PCR test.
However, it has a reportedly better ability to detect a high viral load, with increasing evidence that we need a high concentration of virus before we can actually infect someone else.
So, in that sense, the rapid antigen test is probably better tailored in finding people who are in an active infectious phase.
This could really break the chain and very quickly trace back, then block the spread in a much more efficient manner.
The rapid antigen test could be a quickly deployable resource when timing is key, because within the time it takes for a conventional test to produce results, the other people might have infected many others.
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