National Institute of Health (NIH) on Tuesday, apprised National Command and Operations Center (NCOC) of the formulation of a comprehensive policy regarding Rapid Antigen Testing in Pakistan to further enhance detection of COVID-19 spread in the country.
During the meeting, Executive Director NIH apprised NCOC that provinces have been taken into confidence and that a comprehensive policy for Rapid Antigen Testing has been framed on the guidelines and recommendations of World Health Organization (WHO).
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As per the policy, all government-authorized public laboratories will be allowed to perform antigen tests for specified categories on international standards.
However, private sector laboratories will be allowed to conduct antigen testing on the discretion of provincial government. Moreover, only those labs will be given permission to conduct antigen testing which are already conducting COVID-19 PCR tests.
Pakistan’s COVID-19 positivity ratio stands at 6 per cent. Country’s COVID-19 tally stands at 400,482 cases with 8,091 deaths so far.
Around 343,286 people have successfully recovered from the novel virus whereas 2,165 are still in critical condition.
A total of 2,458 COVID-19 cases along with 67 casualties have been reported in the last 24 hours.
What is Rapid antigen test?
A rapid antigen test (RAT) is a rapid diagnostic test suitable for point-of-care testing that directly detects the presence or absence of an antigen. This distinguishes it from other medical tests that detect antibodies (antibody tests) or nucleic acid (nucleic acid tests), of either laboratory or point of care types.
Antigen tests and antibody tests are often immunoassays (IAs) of one kind or another, such as dipstick IAs or fluorescence immunoassays. While RAT is an immunochromatographic assay which gives visual results that can be seen with the naked eye.
It is considered to be qualitative but a person experienced in RDT testing can easily quantify the results. Being a screening test, the results should be evaluated on the basis of confirmatory tests like PCR testing or western blot.
One inherent advantage of an antigen test over an antibody test (such as antibody-detecting rapid HIV tests) is that it can take time for the immune system to develop antibodies after infection begins, but the foreign antigen is present right away.
Although any diagnostic test may have false negatives, this latency period can open an especially wide avenue for false negatives in antibody tests, although the particulars depend on which disease and which test are involved.
Unlike nucleic acid based tests such as PCR, which detect the presence of genetic material, antigen tests detect proteins or glycans, such as the spike proteins found on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
