the debate on the role of rapid Covid-19 testing in the speed of social opening accelerated.

On Wednesday, the debate on the role of rapid Covid-19 testing in the speed of social opening accelerated.
Hundreds of staff from the aviation industry communicated their messages to the Chief Medical Officer’s Office, calling for rapid antigen testing of passengers.
Other departments and some public health experts have been advocating for more use of antigen testing.
But what is the difference between antigen testing and PCR testing, which may be more familiar to us in Ireland so far?
For a rapid antigen test, the tester will use a swab to take a sample from the person’s nose. This may be uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t be painful. The samples can then be quickly tested on site.
The PCR test uses a swab to collect samples from the back of the throat and nose. Just like an antigen test, this process can be a little uncomfortable. Then the samples need to be sent to the laboratory for testing.
Antigen test results are generally available in less than an hour, and the results can be available in as fast as 15 minutes.
However, it takes longer to obtain the results of the PCR test. Results can be obtained within a few hours at the earliest, but it is more likely to take days or even as long as a week.
The PCR test can detect COVID-19 infection before the person becomes infectious. PCR detection can detect very small levels of virus.
On the other hand, rapid antigen testing shows that the patient is at the peak of infection, when the body’s viral protein concentration is highest. The test will find the virus in most people with symptoms, but in some cases, it may not be infected at all.
In addition, the possibility of false negative results in PCR testing is low, while the disadvantage of antigen testing is its high false negative rate.
The cost of antigen testing through an Irish healthcare provider can be between 40 and 80 euros. Although the range of cheaper home antigen test kits is becoming more and more extensive, some of them cost as low as 5 euros per test.
As the process involved is more complex, PCR testing is more expensive, and the cheapest test costs about 90 Euros. However, their cost is usually between 120 and 150 Euros.
Public health experts who advocate the use of faster antigen testing generally emphasize that it should not be regarded as a substitute for PCR testing, but can be used in public life to increase the detection rate of Covid-19.
For example, international airports, arenas, theme parks, and other crowded areas provide rapid antigen testing to screen for potential positive cases.
Rapid tests will not catch all Covid-19 cases, but they can at least catch some cases that would otherwise be ignored.
Their use is growing in some countries. For example, in some parts of Germany, anyone who wants to eat in a restaurant or exercise in a gym needs to provide a negative antigen test result of no more than 48 hours.
In Ireland, so far, antigen testing has been mainly used for traveling people and certain industries, such as meat factories that have detected a large number of Covid-19 cases.
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