Dr. Damien Kenny:

I do not want to be drawn into a political debate on this. As a practising clinician, I would say you need to choose the appropriate test for the circumstance. If we are looking at facilitating return to travel, the important thing is to have a good screening test. A screening test needs to ensure a high positive predictive value and a high negative predictive value. The problem with antigen testing, in my opinion, is that if a person is asymptomatic, those values go down significantly as a consequence of the fact that it is not able to detect virus. Even more important as we look to open up our borders is that the transmission of variants across borders can be really detrimental.

Being very specific to travel, if you had a clean slate to design a test that would be a good screening tool for asymptomatic people who want to travel with a high risk of a low volume returning with a high-risk variant, you need gold standard testing for that, and for me that is PCR. We need to look at a testing strategy that complements itself. Antigen has its place, lab-based PCR has its place and I firmly believe that real-time,in vitro, point-of-care mobile diagnostics have a place with SARS-CoV-2, particularly in the context of travel as we want to open up.