Dr. Summers recommends PCR tests vs. rapid tests, as COVID-19 cases rise in Western residence

Quick and easy - that’s what usually comes to mind when people think of rapid testing.

Quick and easy - that’s what usually comes to mind when people think of rapid testing.

According to Dr. Gerald Evans, an infectious disease specialist, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests are good for diagnosing COVID-19 for individuals who are a high-risk contact or are experiencing symptoms. While the antigen rapid tests are often used for fast results, surveillance, and screening purposes.

Results for PCR tests typically come back anywhere between 24 hours to five days depending on a lab’s capacity, while rapid tests provide results within 15 minutes.

While the rapid tests may be helpful in some cases, Evans says they’re not always reliable.

“I can use it in a setting where it’s very unlikely that you have an infection, and if so, a negative test is reliable,” says Dr. Evans. “But once you start having symptoms, that rapid antigen test becomes a little bit less useful because a negative test might be falsely negative.”

Evans recommends people with symptoms book a PCR test, as a negative result from the laboratory will be able to determine that the patient has a different virus or has symptoms from another cause.“If you have a cough, a sore throat, and a runny nose and you do that rapid antigen test and it’s negative, that’s a problem because you might still have COVID. There’s probably still a 15 per cent chance that you do, so you might think I have a cold but it’s not COVID so I’m not going to worry about whom I’m coming into contact with.”

Western University is one of several schools in the province that is helping provide free rapid tests for students. On Saturday, Western University declared an outbreak at the Saugeen-Maitland Hall on campus.