Four widely used severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibody tests had high sensitivity and specificity in what scientists said was the first large head-to-head comparison of commercial immunoassays developed during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
The study, funded by Public Health England and the UK National Institute for Health Research, assessed the performance of high-throughput immunoassays from Abbott, DiaSorin, Roche, and Siemens, as well as an Oxford University–developed test. Researchers evaluated the assays using the same set of adult blood samples, which included 976 prepandemic samples and 536 samples from patients with polymerase chain reaction–confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection. Except for the DiaSorin assay, all the tests would have an error rate of less than 1% at a seroprevalence of 10%, the researchers reported in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.