Rapid Testing for Children Barrels Ahead, Despite a Lack of Data

As Covid-19 tears across the country, health experts have been calling for increased access to testing that will help track and contain the virus’s swift and often silent spread.

But some of the cheapest and most convenient diagnostic tools on the market might not perform as promised in a crucial contingent of the population, in which they were already being used: children, whose pint-size bodies might make the coronavirus more difficult to detect.

A small but growing body of evidence, some of which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, suggests that some rapid tests for the coronavirus may falter in very young people, letting low-level infections slip by unnoticed.

In a recent study of more than 1,600 people in Massachusetts, Binax NOW, a rapid test manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, caught 96.5 percent of the coronavirus infections found by a more accurate laboratory test in adults with symptoms. But the rapid test detected just 77.8 percent of the symptomatic cases in people 18 or under. Among people without symptoms, the test faltered further, identifying 70.2 percent of adults and 63.6 percent of children.

Another recent paper, published in November in Clinical Microbiology and Infection, found that a different rapid test by Abbott, called the PanBio, identified just 62.5 percent of coronavirus cases in people 16 or younger, compared with 82.6 percent of infections in adults, although the number of pediatric samples tested was small.

Children rarely seem to have serious cases of Covid, and the youngest among them may also be less likely to pass the coronavirus on to others. But the new findings should encourage more in-depth studies of diagnostic tools for the virus in pediatric populations, health experts said....