key: cord-1016274-dax63n9i
authors: Boddeti, Nymisha L.; Berezowski, Ivan; Taylor, Dania; Prajapati, Dhruvil; Patel, Jigar
title: The Low Yield of SARS-CoV-2 Rapid Antigen Testing in Screening Asymptomatic Hospital Visitors in Low-incidence Settings
date: 2022-01-27
journal: Int J Infect Dis
DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2022.01.046
sha: 8b7292d445e00557dd6afe501d04687a8bd1daa2
doc_id: 1016274
cord_uid: dax63n9i

nan

Hospital Visitors in Low-incidence Settings We read with great interest the recent article by Wee et. al. (Wee et al., 2021) which explores the use of rapid-antigen detection (RAD) testing in asymptomatic hospital visitor screening.

It certainly adds depth to the current literature, and we would like to share some comments.

The authors assessed the utility of RAD testing for SARS-CoV-2 among visitors to a large hospital campus in Singapore over an eight-week period in a low-incidence setting. We believe the term 'low-incidence' requires further clarification such as whether it was defined Since the inclusion criterion only required visitors who "intended" to visit for ≥30 minutes to receive RAD testing, we are uncertain if visitors who declared a short visit but then overstayed, i.e., case 2 in Table 1 , were also included in the study. The reasons for why only 82.4% of visitors who stayed ≥30 minutes received RAD testing needs more clarification. We believe that a CONSORT flow diagram would be useful to display the number and allocation of participants as well as any exclusion criteria contributing to the RAD testing rate.

As Table 1 is traditionally used to display the demographic information about the participants' characteristics such as age, gender, and comorbidities of the visitors should be included. Additionally, Table 1 's title requires clarification, as it indicates that the data was obtained over a 6-week period, while the actual study took place over an 8-week period. It would also be helpful to clarify how it includes a total number of 6 cases despite only 5 visitors having positive RAD testing according to the automated-visitor-management-systems data. Case 6 appears to have been derived from the national digital and retrospective contact tracing, but it is unclear whether the caregiver of the patient underwent RAD testing at each visit prior to the third.

All named authors meet the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship for this article, take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, and have given their approval for this version to be published.

Boddeti N, Berezowski I, Taylor D, Prajapati D, and Patel J declare that they have no financial interest or relationship to disclose regarding this letter to the editor.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

This article is based on previously conducted studies and does not contain any new studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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