Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness

June 30, 2020

Combination of Antibody Based Rapid Diagnostic Tests Used in an Algorithm May Improve Their Performance in SARS CoV-2 Diagnosis

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  • [pre-print, not peer-reviewed] Kushemererwa et al. evaluated 13 rapid-diagnostic IgG/IgM antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2 to inform the development of a diagnostic algorithm for use in settings where PCR-based diagnostics are not available. PCR–positive samples used for the evaluation were collected 0-28 days after the patient was confirmed positive. They evaluated 78 possible combinations of 2 assays to be used in parallel.  
  • The individual sensitivities of the assays ranged from 18% to 74%. The two assays with the optimal combined performance (currently blinded) had a combined sensitivity to 90%. These findings suggest that parallel use of antibody assays may be useful for diagnosing SARS-CoV-2 in low resource settings. [EDITORIAL NOTE: The specificity of the combined test, assuming that a sample is judged positive if either test is positive, will be less than or equal to the specificity of the least specific of the two individual tests] 

Kushemererwa et al. (June 29, 2020). Combination of Antibody Based Rapid Diagnostic Tests Used in an Algorithm May Improve Their Performance in SARS CoV-2 Diagnosis. Pre-print downloaded June 30 from https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.26.20140806