Reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission through routine asymptomatic community testing: a modelling analysis

During the current COVID-19 pandemic, questions remain as to how effective community-based testing campaigns for SARS-CoV-2 have been to date, what factors have driven their relative success, and how their effectiveness can be improved moving forward. Our findings demonstrate that speed and frequency of testing to provide real-time SARS-CoV-2 case data make Antigen-detecting rapid diagnostic tests a valuable tool for case detection, outbreak investigation and contact tracing. However, we find that for random routine community testing to be impactful, testing would need to be frequent and widespread, and diagnosis must be accompanied by changes in behavior for any testing strategy to be effective. Our work can inform more effective and efficient testing strategies as the pandemic continues globally. <br> <br>