• I imagine that’s why there are no self-administered tests here.

    It's worth noting that that is a report about one brand of one type of, relatively uncommon, test, which has already been reported as being less accurate.

    Here's a study on the method of collection generally: "Patient-collected tongue, nasal, and mid-turbinate swabs for SARS-CoV-2 yield equivalent sensitivity to health care worker collected nasopharyngeal swabs" - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20050005v1

  • that is a report about one brand of one type of, relatively uncommon, test, which has already been reported as being less accurate.

    That's true it's not a PCR, was the only comparison I knew of.

    Incidentally the Innova LFT is being used in most NHS Trusts at the moment (according to our Trust emails), and is the one intended for the mass-testing scheme, so it will be the dominant test done by a large margin. It's much less sensitive than a PCR, but it would pick up 40-60% of asymptomatic cases (per test) in any given population which would otherwise not be detected.

  • Yeah, fair points and important to remember the last bit in particular. If it's a choice between catching nothing and catching a large portion of asymptomatic cases, we should be doing the latter.

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