Rapid COVID-19 test developed in Cape Town in final stages

CAPE TOWN - A Cape Town company is in the final stages of a rapid test that will detect COVID-19 in saliva.A saliva collector, basically a stick with a sponge attached, is used to get a sample from a person.“What the tube does is then compresses the sponge and pushes the saliva through a column. What happens in the column is it excludes mucus by size exclusion and in a sense, it also concentrates all the viral proteins that we are targeting.

“That shows that you’ve been exposed to the virus, however, your body needs to react first to the virus in order to detect that it’s been present, so your immune system will then develop IgM antibodies, which are early stage infection antibodies and then it will develop IgG antibodies, so typically the test kits out there, the serological tests detect the antibodies.”

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