How Accurate Are At-Home COVID Tests With The XBB Subvariant?

LOADING ERROR LOADING By now, with the many waves of COVID-19 infections we’ve endured, you may know someone who’s tested negative on an at-home COVID test only to test positive at an urgent care clinic or doctor’s office. Molecular biologists, the people who investigate diagnostic tests, don’t expect XBB — the latest variant creating a storm of infections across the United States — to have much of an effect on the accuracy of our at-home rapid tests. There aren’t any studies or pre-print reports currently available on how effective rapid tests are with XBB, but scientists predict that at-home tests will continue to work well with the latest crop of variants. The part of the coronavirus that at-home tests are designed to look for — the nucleoprotein, or the N-gene — hasn’t changed much, even as the virus has evolved and picked up a ton of mutations, according to Dr. Nathaniel Hafer, an assistant professor of molecular medicine at UMass Chan Medical School. This isn’t well understood — but, at the end of the day, how much viral protein is in the nose is what causes a rapid test to produce a positive test result and there may be something inherently different about the omicron subvariants, Lam said.