A report from the Rapid Research Information Forum (RRIF), a body which is led by Australia's Chief Scientist Alan Finkel and established to help the government navigate the pandemic, found that neither finger prick nor laboratory antibody tests were accurate enough to be used in Australia.
The government initially said the tests, which were supposed to be able to quickly tell if someone has already recovered from COVID-19, would be rolled out to clinics around the country in late March, according to the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday.
The testing kits take a drop of blood and display a black bar if the patient has antibodies.
Carola Vinuesa, one of the authors of the report from Australian National University (ANU), said no test currently available could reliably detect antibodies.
"The reality is, at the moment, they are not useful," she said. "The sensitivity is not very good. They are not useful in being able to say you were infected."
"Most individual results will be false positives. You cannot have the most positive results being false."
Antibody tests are considered crucial because they can give an accurate estimate of how many people are infected with COVID-19. Current tests for the virus can only tell if a patient is infected at the time of testing.
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