@bluebluezoo - I think that would make sense if I was talking about antigen testing, but I'm talking about antibody testing where people take a fingerpick blood sample at home, and then either analyse it at home in a kit, or send the sample to a lab for analysis.
@Cornettoninja I agree that running a big antibody testing programme now would be onerous; I was trying to make the point that we should already have been doing antibody testing at least as much as antigen tests. Whatever it costs, the value of an antigen test is lost almost as soon as it is taken, because you can test negative and then catch Covid in the next 10 minutes, or day, or week. Its usefulness wanes very quickly - who would be reassured by someone saying "I had a swab test last week"? Whereas an antibody test is useful for as long as the immunity lasts - currently 5 months and counting.
@Purpledaisies I know, and I'm saying that's wrong. It doesn't automatically follow that an antibody test won't make a difference, the government/Public Health England have decided that it won't. Back in June, one scientist who was otherwise pouring cold water on the government's antibody testing plans, on the grounds their claims to accuracy weren't solid enough, nevertheless accepted they could help determine who gets a jab:
“If they’re not being used for full epidemiological studies, I think
their main function will be in deciding who to vaccinate, assuming
the vaccine comes. That will be useful — but I’m not sure it’s a gamechanger." (Andrew Preston, University of Bath)
@BigWoollyJumpers Thank you for the clip of virologist Chris Smith, I'm amazed by it! I've read far too much about Covid this past 10 months and I've never come across that figure before.
Re Pillar 3 testing, PHE were talking about 'mass-immunity testing' in April but by August Pillar 3 testing just doesn't appear in the weekly Surveillance Reports. The only antibody testing I could find was 100,000 home fingerpricks for the REACT-2 study, part of Pillar 4, whose purpose is 'to learn more about the prevalence and spread of the virus and for other testing research purposes, such as the accuracy and ease of use of home testing'. Put briefly, they ditched mass immunity testing. (The 120,000 figure was for REACT-1, also part of Pillar 4, and they were swabs, i.e. antigen not antibody tests.)
@LegoPirateMonkey That's the study that prompted me to post in the first place. You're right that it spanned only 5 months, but either natural immunity is enough to make getting Covid much less likely, or it isn't. If a person has a test that shows they already have a sufficient level of immunity, surely it makes sense, given the huge peak in infections we're seeing now, to delay giving them a shot, and give it to someone else who has no immunity?
I agree that natural immunity will vary more than vaccine immunity, but antibody tests do quantify the level of antibodies, so if mass testing had been done, those with immunity below an effective level could be weeded out. I also agree that the vaccine is the only safe way to approach herd immunity; I'm hugely pro-vaccine.
My point is that a whole arm of the government's Covid strategy was dropped in favour of massively concentrating resources on swab testing, which can only ever be a snapshot; the value of every negative result is gone after a few days, so people have to be constantly re-tested. More antibody testing would have helped save on swab tests.
Because we dropped mass antibody testing, and Covid can be asymptomatic in many people, we really have no idea how many people have been infected, so we can only guess at how many will be vaccinated unnecessarily soon. The REACT study estimated 3.4 million in August, it must be 4-5 million by now.
It also means that schools, for example, don't know which of their staff would be the safest to be on-site looking after vulnerable and key-worker children. I don't know if the situation is the same in care homes re care workers and the most vulnerable clients.
I'd also argue that the decision to address everyone as if having had Covid makes no difference whatsoever has meant that when the government does Covid announcements and press conferences, a sizeable proportion of that 4-5 million people who either know (via the few antibody tests that have been done) or suspect that they have had Covid must be thinking, "What about me? Does this apply to me? Why should I do that?" It's not a good idea to have millions of people in a state of uncertainty re something this important. There's a clear risk some will start assuming they've had it, given the needs of many to get back to work. In these circumstances, a swab test just doesn't cut it - people should be able to find out for sure, or at least to a high degree of probability.
I believe the lack of antibody testing has helped - alongside the Cummings fiasco and other failures - to promote a mindset in which people's sense of alienation from the official conversation has made it easier for them to disregard public health messages.
@Bixs Did I get arsey? I'm sorry if it came across like that, I was trying to sound despairing. There were 2 days, not 9 minutes, between the first 2 posts, and the 3rd was just a typo correction.
@CuriousaboutSamphire I'm not sure what you mean by 'put them out of sync with their test call up'. Cost effective? What about saving-lives-effective? NHS staff aren't involved in mass home antibody testing. The amount of work testing companies do - i.e. whether lab capacity is used for antigen vis-a-vis antibody testing - is for the government/PHE to decide. I'm suggesting they've got that balance wrong; that antibody testing would have saved some of the burden of having to repeat swab tests multiple times.
@Snowpatrolling I just think, nowhere near enough.
@Almoistslimjim Fannying about taking blood, doing the antibody test, writing to the person, recording it, inviting those without antibodies to vaccine, setting future antibody tests for those with antibodies to ensure they still have them, then going round in circles again. It would take an enormous effort to do all of that, much more than just vaccinating all those who want it. It's only fannying about if it's not effective, right? Or are we going to rule out possible life-saving courses of action on the grounds that they're a bit of a faff? You tell that to your grandma. Of course there'd be a certain amount of admin involved with antibody testing, but so there is with a vaccine programme. It may well be too late to do it now, but I wasn't ever arguing for that; I was pointing to the consequences, as I saw them, of not having done it when we could.
@atomt Fair enough, but nothing's fully accurate in this game, not swabs, blood tests, whatever. Here's what my blood test result said:
"Sensitivity: The test has been shown to be 100% sensitive at detecting IgG antibodies in people who have been ill from covid-19 at 14 days or more after their first symptoms. Or put another way, there were no people who had a confirmed covid-19 illness who did not develop IgG antibodies (false negatives) 14 days after their first symptoms.
Specificity: The test has been shown to be 99.63% specific. Or put another way, there were only 0.07% of people who either gave blood before SARS-CoV-2 or had a respiratory illness that was caused by another virus who tested positive for IgG antibodies (false positives)."
@trulydelicious I'm nonplussed by the whole 'vaccines elicit a much stronger response' thing. That's new to me. I had Covid pretty badly, but didn't end up in hospital. The idea that my immune system somehow reacted a lot less to that severe illness than it would to a vaccine seems counterintuitive to me - can your immune system have a greatly increased capacity to produce antibodies that is triggered by a selected part of the antigen but can never be triggered even by a severe infection by the entire, unaltered antigen? I can only try and find out more.
By the way, the tone of your posts is very whiny and irritating Well, I'm sorry you find them annoying. Try to ignore it and just have the discussion? What I do when I find a thread whiny and irritating is, I go onto another, less whiny and irritating one, without having a cheap slap at the OP.