Potential Application of SARS-CoV-2 Rapid Antigen Diagnostic Tests for the Detection of Infectious Individuals Attending Mass Gatherings – A Simulation Study

Abstract

Rapid Antigen Diagnostic Tests (RADTs) for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 offer advantages in that they are cheaper and faster than currently used PCR tests but have reduced sensitivity and specificity. One potential application of RADTs is to facilitate gatherings of individuals, through testing of attendees at the point of, or immediately prior to entry at a venue. Understanding the baseline risk in the tested population is of particular importance when evaluating the utility of applying diagnostic tests for screening purposes. We used incidence data from January and from July-August 2021, periods of relatively high and low levels of infection, to estimate the prevalence of infectious individuals in the community at particular time points and simulated mass gatherings by sampling from a series of age cohorts. Nine different illustrative scenarios were simulated, small (n = 100), medium (n = 1,000) and large (n = 10,000) gatherings each with 3 possible age constructs: mostly younger, mostly older or a gathering with equal numbers from each age cohort. For each scenario, we estimated the prevalence of infectious attendees, then simulated the likely number of positive and negative test results, the proportion of cases detected and the corresponding positive and negative predictive values, and the cost per case identified. Our findings suggest that for each reported case on a given day, there are likely to be 13.8 additional infectious individuals also present in the community. Prevalence ranged from 0.26% for “mostly older” events in July-August, to 2.6% for “mostly younger” events in January. For small events (100 attendees) the expected number of infectious attendees ranged from <1 across all age constructs of attendees in July-August, to 2.6 for “mostly younger” events in January. For large events (10,000 attendees) the expected number of infectious attendees ranged from 27 (95% confidence intervals 12 to 45) for mostly older events in July-August, to 267 (95% confidence intervals 134 to 436) infectious attendees for mostly younger attendees in January. Given rapid changes in SARS-CoV-2 incidence over time, we developed an RShiny app to allow users to run updated simulations for specific events.