COVID-19 Testing: A Look Ahead + Abbott's BinaxNOW Q&A

IHP's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Richard Arriviello, discusses what we can expect this fall with COVID testing and Abbott's new antigen test BinaxNOW.

Dr. Arriviello answers the key questions:
What can we expect to see this fall?
What kind of testing frequency for a surveillance program makes sense?
At what point of the infection is the BinaxNOW test most sensitive?
Can it be used to identify asymptomatic cases?

"This fall/winter we can expect a lot of overlap between flu and COVID symptoms. Somehow we have to determine which is the seasonal flu, seasonal allergies, allergic rhinitis or COVID. A lot of testing can help us discern which is which. Testing every two weeks for a surveillance program is what we're doing now at our Family Urgent Care. The BinaxNow Antigen test was introduced to do mass testing. According to Abbott, the tests can perform 100s of tests in under an hour in rapid-fire succession. However, Abbott's ID Now Molecular test is much more sensitive because it detects the virus's nucleic acids. The BinaxNOW antigen test was created to pick up the virus's proteins and is most sensitive when someone has symptoms for about 4 days. The viral load is much less in an asymptomatic case and requires a highly sensitive molecular test like a PCR or Abbott ID Now Rapid Test to detect the presence of COVID. The higher viral load, people get symptomatic quicker, and they get more severity of the disease. There are many patients I see in my urgent care, which we have about a 10% positive rate of testing, and many people that test positive, and we perform an antibody test on those patients, and they have no antibodies in their system. And many of these patients have minimal to no symptoms at all—not enough to produce antibodies."