Background
The focus on laboratory-based diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) warrants alternative public health tools such as rapid antigen tests. While there are a number of commercially available antigen tests to detect severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), all cross-react with the genetically similar SARS-CoV-1 or require an instrument for
Significance
Overall, our results suggest that the rapid antigen test is optimized to detect SARS-CoV-2 N during the acute phase of COVID-19. The rapid antigen tests developed in this study are alternative tools for wide scale public health surveillance of COVID-19.