The Netherlands will be rolling out rapid COVID-19 breath tests in order to boost its testing process of detecting the coronavirus in the country.
Testing facilities in Amsterdam were the first to roll out SpiroNose, a machine that requires a person to breathe into it and will indicate if the person is possibly infected with the virus.
In a Reuters report, Dutch health officials found SpiroNose reliable after months of trials.
“If you are negatively tested, then it’s a very reliable outcome and you can go,” infectious disease expert Mariken van der Lubben of Amsterdam’s municipal health services told Reuters.
If a person tested positive from the breath rapid test, then he or she will be subjected to real time polymerase chain reaction RT-PCR test to confirm if it’s indeed COVID-19.
The Netherlands has ordered 1,800 machines and will introduce it to the entire country in the succeeding months.
“It’s a promising technology, especially because of the speed, you can get a result within a minute,” Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst told Reuters.
“That’s a game changer, if you can make a rapid diagnosis or rule out an infection within a minute. We don’t have enough results yet to unequivocally say this is the future, this is the way to go,” he added.
The company behind SpiroNose, Breathomix said that they also developed the machine to detect asthma and lung cancer.
The company said that they have enough data to also spot possible COVID-19 infection.
“In the past couple of months we have measured thousands of patients with corona and people who don’t have corona, so we know what is the average breath profile of corona and people without corona,” Breathomix executive Rianne de Vries said.
The machine however is not advisable for large events since every test will need two to three minutes to finish.
It is also sensitive to alcohol, smoke and other factors in a person’s breath. (TDT)
