Self-testing for Covid-19
Modified22 Jul 2021, 11:37 pm
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Key Highlights
To date, three antigen rapid test kits have been approved:
1) Salixium (91.4% sensitivity; 100% specificity) - Saliva and nasal swab (Malaysia)
2) Gmate (90.9% sensitivity; 100% specificity) - Saliva (South Korea)
3) Beright (90.1% sensitivity; 99.3% specificity) - Saliva (China)
How to make sense of the performance metrics? Sensitivity means the rate at which the kit will correctly identify a positive result while specificity means the rate at which it will correctly detect negative results.
91.4 percent sensitivity means out of 100 tests, 8.6 of them could be false negatives. 100 percent specificity means there won't be any false positives.
Errors can be minimised by taking more than one test. You should note that these test kits are not authoritative tools to confirm if you have Covid-19.