The Food and Drug Administration warned on Tuesday that COVID-19 antigen tests may be significantly less able to detect Omicron, the rapidly escalating variant of COVID.
The recent warning is based on early research from the National Institutes of Health’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative using samples from patients with live viruses - survey that “represents the best way to evaluate true test performance in the short-term,” as stated by the FDA.
On Tuesday, the FDA stated that the “early data suggests that antigen tests do detect the Omicron variant but may have reduced sensitivity.”
The existence of numerous mutations in the Omicron variant of the virus has led to an increased possibility of it evading the defense against COVID that was achieved through vaccines and treatments of the likes of some monoclonal antibodies.
The FDA has found that the presence of mutations in the virus may reduce the effectiveness of the test depending on the variant sequence...