Date:  December 18, 2020

Time: 5:00am PST, 2:00pm CET

Europe continues to battle a second wave of COVID19 epidemic; more than 30.000 newly infected patients are being confirmed daily in Italy. As of November 16th, 27,687 individuals have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Italy, of whom 600 have passed away. The World Health Organization (WHO) has raised a global warning and announced the need for a test system for COVID-19- suspected patients (World Health Organization, 2020). SARS-CoV-2 is known to be spread even by infected people who experience only mild symptoms or are asymptomatic carriers (Li etal.,2020;Baietal., 2020; Rothe et al., 2020). Therefore, there is a need to expand testing capacity also to asymptomatic individuals to stop transmission. In routine clinical practice, SARS-CoV-2 infection is determined by reverse-transcription PCR (RT-PCR) analysis (Corman et al., 2020). The RT-PCR test is conducted using different types of specimens, including sputum, nasopharyngeal swabs, pharyngeal swabs, saliva, stool, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, and endotracheal aspirate fluid (KK-W et al., 2020; To et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020). However, the RT-PCR test is not rapid (it typically takes 3–4 h for results), and it requires specialized laboratory equipment and skilled technicians, while antigen tests are simple and can be performed routinely in clinical laboratories (Lai et al., 2020; Clerc and Greub, 2010). New more cost-effective and high throughput test system will be important for preventing viral spread and monitoring infection levels in COVID-19 patients. Here, we are presenting a newly approach of Covid-19 testing that will be used as a filter, by identifying, isolating, and thus filtering out currently infected persons, including those who are asymptomatic. This is a new regimen of testing to detect frequently the asymptomatic infected persons, which are primary source of transmission.

Learning Objectives:

• To assess the use of Antigen assay in screening of asymptomatic COVID-19 individuals
• To demonstrate the impact of a new regimen of COVID-19 testing
• To evaluate whether the new screening approach is cost-effective

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