Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

May 14, 2020

Performance of the Rapid Nucleic Acid Amplification by Abbott ID NOW COVID-19 in Nasopharyngeal Swabs Transported in Viral Media and Dry Nasal Swabs in a New York City Academic Institution

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  • A comparison study found that the Abbot ID NOW COVID-19 assay missed one-third of the samples that tested positive by Cepheid Xpert Xpress when using NP swabs in VTM and missed over 48% when using dry nasal swabs. 
  • While the Abbot ID NOW COVID-19 platform offers faster turn-around time compared to RT-PCR platforms, it may have poor sensitivity, resulting in a high false negative rate. 

Basu. (2020). Performance of the Rapid Nucleic Acid Amplification by Abbott ID NOW COVID-19 in Nasopharyngeal Swabs Transported in Viral Media and Dry Nasal Swabs in a New York City Academic Institution. Pre-print downloaded May 13 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.11.089896