Comparison of diagnostic efficacy of the Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 assay and the BGI real-time fluorescent RT-PCR kit for the RT-PCR-based detection of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2

Abstract

Introduction/Objective. Based on the World Health Organization guidelines, the current "gold standard" to diagnose Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is reverse transcription-quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). The objective of this study was to compare and analyze the detection performance of two different authorized SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid detection assays: the Abbott RealTime SARS-CoV-2 (ACOV) assay and the BGI Real-Time Fluorescent RT-PCR (BGI) kit. Methods. Our study included 384 randomly selected nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs previously tested by the ACOV and subsequently tested by the BGI kit for detecting SARS-CoV-2. All patients were adult individuals with symptoms or suspected of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Results. We found that the ACOV assay detected more cases of COVID-19 infection than the BGI assay. The positive percent agreement was 98.3% (95% confidence intervals (95% CI): 95.7-99.3%), while Cohen?s Kappa coefficient (Kappa) was 0.86 (95% CI: 0.80-0.91), indicating a strong level of agreement between these two tests. The negative percent agreement was 85.1% (95% CI: 78.3-90%), while 5.47% of cases were false negative using the BGI test to detect SARS-CoV-2. The sensitivity of the BGI test compared to Abbott was 91.73% (95% CI: 87.64-94.81%), and the specificity of the BGI test was 96.77% (95% CI: 91.95-99.11%). Conclusion. The Abbott kit showed a bit better diagnostic performance, and due to possible false negative results using the BGI test, we recommend complete testing with the ACOV test.