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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaScience

Green light for 12 Covid-19 rapid antigen tests as China races to beat Omicron variant fuelling worst outbreak since 2020

  • National health official says rapid tests should play a complementary role to definitive nucleic acid diagnosis
  • Relying only on nucleic acid tests not ‘realistic’ for vast country, HKU virologist says

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A child is lifted up for a nucleic acid swab as people queue in the snow for Covid-19 tests in Changchun, in northeastern China’s Jilin province. Photo: AP
Josephine Ma
China has approved seven more rapid antigen test (RAT) kits for Covid-19, bringing the total to 12 as the country races to stop the spread of the Omicron variant severely challenging its zero-Covid defences in place since 2020.
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In a break with past policy of only carrying out nucleic acid tests to confirm infections, the National Health Commission on Friday authorised the use of RATs by the public “to optimise detection of Sars-CoV-2” , the coronavirus that causes Covid-19. Test kits from five companies were approved the same day. By Wednesday, seven new products had been added to the list.
This comes as China grapples with a growing number of Omicron infections, with outbreaks in at least 16 provinces and more than 18,000 positive cases logged since the beginning of March.

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Li Jinming, deputy director of the NHC’s Clinical Testing Centre, said nucleic acid tests remained the main means of identifying Covid-19 infections, but RATs should play a complementary role.

Li said such tests were mostly for three types of people: those who still had symptoms five days after onset but tested negative on nucleic acid tests; travellers or close contacts in quarantine; as well as those who tested negative on nucleic acid tests but found it “necessary” to test again.

Antigen tests may produce false positive results, he cautioned, saying they could not be used as definitive diagnosis.

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RATs pick up the protein of the virus without amplification and are therefore believed to be less accurate than nucleic acid tests. China had shunned the tests in the two years since the pandemic first broke out, although they were widely deployed in the West. This is the first time RATs have been made commercially available in China.

The worst-hit northeastern province of Jilin, which accounted for 60 per cent of local symptomatic cases on Tuesday, aims to buy 12 million of the rapid test kits.
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