A British company, Vatic, has announced a new COVID-19 test that can return a result in 15 minutes.
Vatic’s KnowNow COVID-19 test is a type of lateral flow test, but “works in a completely different way to every other antigen test that exists”, according to the company’s chief executive Alex Sheppard.
Mr Sheppard told Sky News the company was announcing the technological mechanism behind the test ahead of it receiving regulatory approval “simply because it’s totally different to anything else out there”.
“The chemistry behind the test essentially renders the test as an infectiousness test, because what we’re detecting is only the infectious virus – we can’t detect non-infectious viruses,” Mr Sheppard said.
Experts, including scientists at Public Health England’s Porton Down laboratory and the University of Oxford, have warned that such tests have too high a false positive rate to replace laboratory ones.
According to Vatic, its test has not produced any false positives during its internal trials – however the company acknowledges a very small sample size of 200 tests, giving at best a 0.5% granular view of its effectiveness.
