How would you use this test if we had it here? (And why haven't we?)

[PuzzledObserver]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-54394128

Obvious first place to deploy it - health and social care staff. Possibly even at the start of each shift. Much better than the current system (my DH works in a care home) of have a weekly test, wait nearly a week for the result.

Could allow resumption of concerts and theatre etc if everyone was tested on the way in. Would you pay a fiver more and wait for 15 minutes, if it meant you could go to something you have really been missing? I would.

And as they appear to be using it in Madrid - test everyone in areas where cases are rising rapidly. That way you can find the asymptomatic people and get them to isolate, thus damping it down much much quicker.

Does that virologist work in a current COVId testing lab. As far as I’m aware, there is guidance for the labs on what to do in case of a weak positive, which involves retesting/resampling to see whether it’s due to early stage infection or inactive virus from a recent infection that is no longer infectious.

It was Prof. Pitt from Brighton Uni, but it was a spoken interview.
She did definitely say that there is no lower threshold for giving a positive test with Covid-19 PCR testing, which there would normally be for other viruses using the same test method.

If you're using tests like that in an entertainment venue what happens if people kick off because either they don't want to be tested or they're asymptomatic and want to be allowed in regardless of a positive test?

I confess that the entertainment venues I had in mind were serious theatres and concert halls - the regular clientele of which don’t ten to be the sort to cause riots. I can see how it would be problematic in some venues, though.

Re manufacturing - one of the things which has been really noticeable is the speed with which industry has started supplying things we didn’t know we needed. I’m sure some deal could be found to enable the tests to be manufactured here, with a licence fee going to the patent holder.

I’m not really buying the idea that there’s no threshold, Disconnect. A cursory google suggests there is, but you’ve got me intrigued.

I don't work in the labs so I can't confirm either way. I am only relaying what the virology professor said when interviewed on the news.

Anyway, news today is that the government is ready to trial the airport testing system in a couple of weeks, but exempt business travellers - guess their science shows that business travellers can't get or transmit Covid-19

What is also interesting in terms of false positives or in a similar vein - those 3 young men in Italy who are in enforced quarantine because they are still producing positive test results after 3 months.
They are effectively locked up and unable to leave their quarantine.
But they surely can't still be actively ill and infectious after 3 months? In this country they would have been quarantined for 2 weeks and told it was fine to go out and about after that.
So the tests must be picking up dead virus or viral fragments surely for all 3 of them to still be testing positive after 3 months.
I know on another thread someone mentioned that these long-term false-positive test results might account for some of the positive test results among university students since they are testing asymptomatic people who may have had the virus previously.