Combining rapid antigen testing and syndromic surveillance improves community-based COVID-19 detection in a low-income country.
Authors
Haddou, Yacob
Andrecka, Joanna
Shirin, Tahmina
Alamgir, ASM
Khan, Farzana
Mair, Frances S
Sania, Ayesha
Publication Date
2022-05-26Journal Title
Nat Commun
ISSN
2041-1723
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
13
Issue
1
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Chadwick, F. J., Clark, J., Chowdhury, S., Chowdhury, T., Pascall, D., Haddou, Y., Andrecka, J., et al. (2022). Combining rapid antigen testing and syndromic surveillance improves community-based COVID-19 detection in a low-income country.. Nat Commun, 13 (1) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30640-w
Description
Funder: Juniper Consortium MR/V038613/1
Funder: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation)
Abstract
Diagnostics for COVID-19 detection are limited in many settings. Syndromic surveillance is often the only means to identify cases but lacks specificity. Rapid antigen testing is inexpensive and easy-to-deploy but can lack sensitivity. We examine how combining these approaches can improve surveillance for guiding interventions in low-income communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Rapid-antigen-testing with PCR validation was performed on 1172 symptomatically-identified individuals in their homes. Statistical models were fitted to predict PCR-status using rapid-antigen-test results, syndromic data, and their combination. Under contrasting epidemiological scenarios, the models' predictive and classification performance was evaluated. Models combining rapid-antigen-testing and syndromic data yielded equal-to-better performance to rapid-antigen-test-only models across all scenarios with their best performance in the epidemic growth scenario. These results show that drawing on complementary strengths across rapid diagnostics, improves COVID-19 detection, and reduces false-positive and -negative diagnoses to match local requirements; improvements achievable without additional expense, or changes for patients or practitioners.
Keywords
Article, /692/699/255/2514, /692/700/478/174, /692/700/139, /692/1807, /631/326/596/4130, article
Sponsorship
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) (INV-022851, INV-022851)
RCUK | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/R513222/1)
Wellcome Trust (Wellcome) (207569/Z/17/Z)
Identifiers
s41467-022-30640-w, 30640
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30640-w
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/337511
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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