As hundreds of test kits claim to offer accurate results on previous Covid-19 infection, scientists around the world are working hard to assess their accuracy. In The Guardian professor Marion Koopmans tells about the situation with all the test kits.
At the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Marion Koopmans and a team of scientists are going throught the laborious process of verifying antibody tests for Covid-19. Over the last two months, dozens of prospective tests have hit the market, and with many governments wanting to feed the results of large-scale testing into their decisions whether to end lockdowns, biological tests have rarely carried such weight.
Most of the tests are enthusiastically marketed, boasting of their ability to accurately detect whether someone has previously been infected with the Sars-CoV-2 virus. The painstaking job of proving whether the tests do what they say has fallen to a worldwide network of 12 independent centres, of which Koopmans’s team is one.
“There are now more than 200 tests being offered and that number is increasing by the day,” she says. “Because people want to have testing up and running fast, there’s this massive, almost aggressive marketing of test kits that promise a lot, but haven’t gone through proper scrutiny.”
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