Rapid antigen testing is a game changer. After spending the last 7 months performing PCR testing with anywhere from 3-14 day turnaround, it’s satisfying to actually have results with a plan for each patient.

Our particular test continues to be very sensitive and specific. We are finding that positives are true positives and negatives are true negatives.

The only people we are ordering confirmatory PCR for are for symptomatic patients (COVID symptoms) who test negative on rapid antigen but we have high clinical suspicion of COVID.

Initially we were sending confirmatory PCR testing on asymptomatic patients who tested positive on the rapid antigen, but then from the data we saw that wasn’t necessary.

To be clear, the test result is only part of our workflow. We also consider presence or absence of symptoms and whether or not person had high risk exposure to determine their discharge plan.

While rapid antigen testing is not the gold standard like PCR, it is cost effective, rapid (15-20 minutes) and the descriptive statistics are pretty good. It’s what we need right now because otherwise we are waiting days for results which pointless or testing is not happening.

BD Veritor System Rapid COVID Test