Urgent hospital admission, asymptomatic/symptom status unknown

Current practices

When patients need critical care, point-of-care NAATs will provide swift and accurate results (FigureĀ 1). These patients are not being admitted due to symptoms of COVID-19 and, as such, repeat testing following a negative NAAT test would not be required, unless indicators arise to suggest a patient does have respiratory symptoms.

Key considerations

If results can be obtained more quickly using an antigen test in this clinical setting, then an antigen test in the interim is also acceptable; however, the result should be confirmed with a NAAT, which might be performed on site in a centralized laboratory.66 In patients with respiratory symptoms in the ED setting, antigen testing has still been shown to produce false-negative results.66 Depending on the clinical setting and the care that the patient requires, other assessments for the presenting condition may also reveal the likelihood of a respiratory infection but are not diagnostic for COVID-19.73