Evaluation of Performance of the BD Veritor SARS-CoV-2 Chromatographic Immunoassay Test in Patients with Symptoms of COVID-19

摘要

Severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first detected as the causa- tive agent for an outbreak of viral pneumonia in 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization subsequently named the illness caused by SARS-CoV-2 as corona- virus disease 19 (COVID-19) and declared COVID-19 a world pandemic in March 2020 (1, 2). Due to the highly transmissible nature of COVID-19, rapid and accurate assays for SARS-CoV-2 remain the cornerstone for clinical management and effective isolation of symptomatic patients (2). Several diagnostic tests have been developed and com- mercialized for the detection of COVID-19 in response to increasing demand for testing (3). Although viral culture is the primary method for isolation of SARS-CoV-2, isolation of virus requires days and needs specialized facilities with a biosafety level-3 labora- tory. Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAAT), such as RT-PCR, reduce the time frame to detection of viral nucleic acid down to minutes or hours and have excellent specificity and sensitivity (4), and are considered the gold standard for detecting COVID-19 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (5). However, implementation is burden- some due to high costs and, as a result, this methodology is not broadly available (4). In contrast, rapid antigen tests can be used widely in clinical laboratories and point of care testing (POCT) settings.