Testing of child in school - why consent?

[DadDadDad]

I come at this with a spirit of wanting to catch Covid-19 in schools and prevent its spread, and obviously the idea of testing with a LFT every pupil three times in school then ongoing at home is aiming to do this.

But then the logic gets a bit hazier. If a child gets a positive test they and their household must self-isolate for 10 days. They cannot get a PCR test after a positive school test, and if they test positive at home they should get a confirmatory PCR test. But even if that's negative, isolation should continue (as I understand it).

My children can still go to school even if we withdraw consent for them to be tested. There is a chance of false positives with LFT. If they test positive, three adults (who have all had a vaccine dose) and two children will have to isolate.

Doesn't that create an incentive to refuse testing of our children? (Particularly as my DW is also testing regularly as she works in schools).

No.
And there are a gazillion threads about this already, with most of them pointing out there are more false negatives than false positives.

There is no individual benefit to consenting at all, as far as I can see.

We have consented out of a sense of social responsibility. The more people that test, the more likely it is that asymptomatic cases will be picked up at an early stage.

We all have individual reasons for not having to isolate, work, money, social but we do it to protect others. I don't want it myself, but personally know I'd be really upset with myself if I passed it into someone else, hence I've been really careful, had my vaccine as qualified through work and still doing LFTs

Sorry, I did look through the Coronavirus forum page and couldn't see a thread title on this topic.

I too take the social responsibility seriously, and would isolate as required if I had come into contact with Covid. But even if I continue to get my children tested there must be many now thinking "it's not worth the risk".

And the government have made this worse because they say if you get a positive LFT in school you cannot request a follow-up PCR test, so there is no opportunity to weed out false positives, which in some areas are going to occur at a higher rate than the true positives.

Yes, I'm sure that there will be some who think it isn't worth the risk, and others who just won't bother because the tests themselves are quite unpleasant.

Personally, if the lateral flow tests are worth doing at all, I think they should have been compulsory, with medical exemptions only, or at the very least, it should have been done on an opt-out basis. I'm sure that there will be some parents who simply didn't get their act together to consent in time.

I agree OP. I am totally compliant with the rules, as are my children, but I am concerned about false positive LFTs and am tempted to withdraw consent.
I think my children will want to test though...
DS2 has already had 2 negative LVT tests.
I am worried about children missing even more school unnecessarily.
Why won't they do PCR to confirm, like workplaces?

I would rather do the tests at home, as a false positive can then be over ruled by a negative PCR and the 10 days isolation avoided.

Interestingly, on Monday, across my DC's two secondary schools, they had a total of around 1800 LFT and every single one was negative. I'm going to go away an do some statistical testing (I'm an actuary) on that to see how it compares with the media-reported 0.1% false positive rate.

The daft LFT outweighing a PCR rule only applies to the first 3 tests taken in school, then logic is reinstated for the at-home testing.

This situation demonstrates why normally medical tests and processes require proper information to be provided to people so they can make an informed decision. That did not happen in most school/local authorities (whoever was in charge of obtaining this medical consent for these in-school tests). Medical consent, when given properly, can also be withdrawn...

What's the concern about false positives?
The test is looking for virus, and it's meant to be not ever so sensitive, so it misses quite a large percentage where people have low amounts of virus in their systems. So there is a risk of false negatives.

But false positive can surely only happen if:

1. The test is broken for some reason.
2. Someone who is positive contaminates it.

It can't be a commonly occurring thing (unless there is a lot of contamination) because it's finding something that's not there to begin with.

On permission, I've given it for ours, and I wish everyone was testing, but as it's quite intrusive and not comfortable, it makes sense that children with sensory sensitivities could find it too difficult to cope with at school, so hopefully are able to do it at home, or are exempt.

I’d withdraw permission personally & just test at home instead as a PCR test overrides a LFT in a home kit. Im all for testing, I’m 100% on board but you can’t have one rule for high schools only & another for every other lateral test in existence, it’s ridiculous!

Government trying to hide the amount of cases related to schools perhaps ? Or are positive LFT's counted in the daily number of positive cases ?

What other reason would there be for advising a PCR to confirm or deny in every other setting other than in schools ?

Mine are being tested so we can get out of this shit a bit sooner. I WFH and either collect or have shopping delivered.

After reflection, we decided we were happy to keep consenting - it does seem that false positives are very rare, and like others I support testing to try to spot cases as much as possible.

Interestingly, when I asked a question of the school, I got sent the government guidance, which includes this snippet:

Robust evaluations from PHE and the University of Oxford show that LFD tests are accurate, reliable and successfully identify those with coronavirus (COVID-19) who could pass on the virus without realising. The tests have extremely low rates of false positives. LFD tests taken on test sites, such as on school and college grounds, do not need a confirmatory PCR test. This is because these tests are done in a controlled environment and trained staff read the results.

So, the answer I guess is that they consider it a waste of time (and testing resource) because staff doing LF tests in school do them reliably.

Daisy the issue is the sheer number of tests. A small percent of false positives in either a small number of tests, or a large number of positives (think pregnancy tests) becomes insignificant. The large number of tests that are expected to be negative means a small percent of false positives accounts for a high percent of positive results.

As someone whose child is out of school due to a false positive we will now only test at home. What I am most cross about is that I had no idea that the follow up PCR test wouldn’t negate the LFD test, due to the tests in school being deemed administered by trained staff - no they are all administered by the children themselves be it at home or school.

Second gripe is that track and trace phoned my child to obtain family details, which being compliant they gave out. I am absolutely not happy for my child to be contacted by a stranger and to ask for personal details.

Gripe 3 Track and trace asked child if they were self isolating. This could form the basis of a legal proceeding so should come with a) adult supervision being there b) the legal ‘anything you say may be used in a court....’

I think it’s just a fad. People will soon get over the novelty factor and stop bothering.

I think there is definitely a risk with the home kits that people will lie about the results if positive or simply log a negative result without actually carrying out the test.