Persistence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Omicron Variant in Children and Utility of Rapid Antigen Testing as an Indicator of Culturable Virus

We screened 65 longitudinally collected nasal swab samples from 31 children aged 0–16 years who were positive for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 Omicron BA.1. By day 7 after onset of symptoms, 48% of children remained positive by rapid antigen test. In a sample subset, we found 100% correlation between antigen test results and virus culture.