The Impact of SARS-CoV-2 Rapid Antigen Testing Kit Screening in Bangkok Community

Summary

Our current focus is to reduce the spread of COVID through distribution of Rapid Antigen Test Kits (ATKs) to low-income, high-risk communities across Bangkok.

Hospitals across Thailand have been operating over capacity for many months, both in receiving the high number of cases as well as in testing for COVID. RT PCR, although highly sensitive, requires potentially infectious people to travel to testing sites, wait in line, and takes 1-2 days to return results, leading to further spread of COVID through increased contact with other high-risk individuals.

On the contrary, testing via an Antigen Test Kit (ATK) can be done by everyone at home with the potential to test more frequently than the PCR test due to much cheaper cost. This means that ATK testing can be mixed into people's daily lifestyle, but another underlying reason is that ATKs only show test results as positive only when an infected person is contagious. Another key advantage is the rapid results, which helps people identify risks quickly, limiting spread even faster.

Our trial therefore aims to achieve the following primary objective:

To monitor the results of freely distribute ATKs in real environments to measure its effectiveness in reducing COVID spread in communities by comparing the incidence of COVID-19 between communities with rapid antigen tests and without rapid antigen tests.

Secondary objectives are:

1. To compare the incidence of severe COVID-19 between communities with rapid antigen tests and without rapid antigen tests.
2. To study the decrease in incidence of community-acquired COVID-19 in communities with rapid antigen tests.
3. To study factors affecting community-acquired COVID-19 in these communities.
4. To campaign for the government to recognize the importance and effectiveness of weekly testing, and propose suitable strategies to fight COVID.

Conditions

• Covid19
• SARS-CoV-2
• Community Transmissions
• Coronavirus Infections

Interventions

DIAGNOSTIC_TEST

Rapid antigen testing kit

COVID-19 Saliva Antigen Rapid Test Tigsun COVID-19 Speichel Antigen-Schnelltest

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Yuvabadhana foundation

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Zero COVID Thailand

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• Chulalongkorn University

  collaborator OTHER

• Ministry of Health, Thailand

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Mahidol University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Gasit Saksirisampant, MD · Mahidol University

• Dhammika Leshan Wannigama, MD.PhD · Chulalongkorn University

• Katika Akksilp, MD · Ministry of Health, Thailand

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SCREENING

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

10 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2021-11-01

Primary Completion

2022-12-31

Completion

2023-01-13

Countries

• Thailand

Study Locations