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Background: In a hospital setting, there is a need for rapid detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) to guide isolation measures and targeted admission.Aim: To evaluate the diagnostic performance of five SARS-CoV-2 rapid nucleocapsid protein antigen detection (RAD) assays (Biosynex, Biotical, Orient Gene, Panbio and SD Biosensor), and describe the performance and impact of implementation of the SD Biosensor assay in an emergency department.Methods: Sensitivity and specificity of the five RAD assays were analysed on 100 respiratory samples: 60 real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR)-confirmed SARS-CoV-2-positive samples, 24 SARS-CoV-2 RNA-negative samples and 16 samples positive for other respiratory pathogens. The manufacturer's protocol was adapted to validate the antigen tests on transport media used for rRT-PCR in the authors' routine practice. The SD Biosensor RAD assay was implemented as a screening method for rapid diagnosis and targeted admission.Findings: Sensitivity of the five RAD assays ranged from 88.9% to 100% for samples with cycle threshold values <26, and specificity ranged from 46.2% to 100%. During the implementation period, 4195 RAD tests were performed. Due to the rapid RAD result, 157 patients were transferred directly to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cohort ward instead of the regular ward (N=47) or the temporary COVID-19 ward (N=110).Conclusion: The SD Biosensor, Biotical and Panbio SARS-CoV-2 antigen tests showed acceptable overall performance, and identified the majority of contagious patients. In the context of high prevalence of SARS-CoV-2, RAD tests can be used as a rapid screening tool to guide infection prevention measures and aid targeted admission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: To speed up antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST), the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) proposed rapid AST (RAST), a disk diffusion method to be read after 4, 6 and 8 hours of incubation. We investigated the feasibility of implementation of RAST in a non-automated lab setting., Materials & Methods: To this end, reference strains as well as a variety of clinical and resistant strains were used to spike sterile hemocultures (BioMérieux BACT/ALERT 3D® and Becton Dickinson BACTEC FX® systems), followed by RAST in comparison to classical long-incubation AST., Results & Conclusion: Our results with reference strains show that reading RAST after 4 hours is frequently too soon to obtain clinical results, and that Streptococcus pneumoniae reference strain did yield readable inhibition zones in RAST when harvested from BioMérieux BACT/ALERT 3D® bottle cultures. In a wider panel of strains, Gram positives RAST results were very similar to standard AST, while with Gram negative species errors were more frequently observed, limiting clinical implementation.