Yet another government ballsup

[notrub]

www.bbc.com/news/health-56321537

This makes absolutely NO sense.

LF tests have 1-3 false positives per 1000 (everyone agrees).
There's ~9 million kids in UK schools. If half have these 3 tests - that's 13.5 million tests, so we can expect at least 13,500 false positives - potentially MORE than actual positives!

Why on earth would you NOT want these double checked?? As it stands that's a LOT of families who are going to have to self-isolate for no reason, and a LOT of kids (if you include the bubbles) who are going to miss school unecessarily.

The ONLY reason I can think of is that if these false positives are demonstrated as such by PCR testing, the government are concerned about newspaper headlines saying LF tests don't work.... In short, it's once again politics ahead of the best interests of the country.

*negative PCR test

Clarification my arse - it directly contradicts what Vicky Ford is quoted by reports as saying this morning.

Why are people so surprised?
Surely, nobody expects these tests to be effective, it's all they've got though.

I expect she "misspoke".

staggering that a minister doesn't understand her own department's policy on something quite critical

The government has got one thing right and in a timely manner with the Covid 19 pandemic. Vaccination. The one thing where they have followed the medical advice ('experts' as Michael Gove would say) to the letter.

Everything else wrong to some degree, and communication being very poor throughout. Possibly because they have lost the ability to know when they intend to lie or not, as they lie on an industrial scale.

The problem is the false negatives. Listening to the radio today they were saying people are getting negative LFTs and having parties, then having covid outbreaks.

The BMJ says that LFTs are ONLY useful if the false negative issue is well understood, which it's not. My daughter's friend told her she 'definitely doesn't have covid' because she'd done a negative lft. Given this is a 10 year old testing herself I'm the opposite of reassured by this statement. Apparently she was hugging everyone in school today saying 'it's fine, I definitely don't have covid'.

www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n238

This study done by Birmingham Uni showed that lateral flow tests detected 3 positives in a school testing but missed 60 (detected through PCR). Only finding 3 out of 63 positives is rubbish and possibly (if the 60 who were positive but were falsely reassured by the negatives and stopped social distancing / mask wearing etc) could make outbreaks of covid significantly worse.

www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4941

There have also been studies showing that false negatives are lower when HCPs do the testing but much higher when others (i.e. parents, students) do it.

I think this could be a massive misstep and could result in an explosion in covid infections if they don't explain that a negative doesn't mean you are 100% definitely covid free (and can kiss and hug your friends) - which seems to be what a lot of people think.

@peak2021

The government has got one thing right and in a timely manner with the Covid 19 pandemic. Vaccination. The one thing where they have followed the medical advice ('experts' as Michael Gove would say) to the letter.

Everything else wrong to some degree, and communication being very poor throughout. Possibly because they have lost the ability to know when they intend to lie or not, as they lie on an industrial scale.

Yes - too much credit for this.

They took a gamble and it paid off - ordering loads of vaccines even before it was known if they worked.

Then credit to them for not doing something stupid and outsourcing the program like they did TTT.... otherwise is this not something we'd EXPECT them to be able to do competently?? It's not exactly rocket science.

What we really seem to be saying is THANK YOU FOR NOT F*ING UP FOR ONCE!!

I mean I still can't get over the fact they spent billions ordering something like 20 years of supply of PPE at a time when it was at its most expensive. Most of that PPE is either not yet in the UK, or cluttering up our container ports and is partly responsible for making shipping to the UK vastly more expensive than a year ago.

I wonder how many % salary increase they could have given nurses if they'd ordered say a reasonable quantity of PPE - like maybe 2 years supply - but since most of the "suppliers" were friends and family I guess they couldn't resist.....