Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Wonder how much impact not having medical staff doing the tests has on fake positives or negatives?

Wasnt it this thread where I was Amazon-shamed by @Fox ?
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-12/royal-mail-publishes-list-of-uk-covid-blackspots-no-longer-receiving-post

Wonder how much impact not having medical staff doing the tests has on fake positives or negatives?

A quick Google says they're comparable. The walk-in clinics are supervised, and when I did one I was encouraged to change the angle of approach into my brain to get a bit deeper. I think if there were serious discrepancies it would have been discussed pretty widely.

I heard about that on the radio this morning and thought of you :)

Free school meal substitutes going well;

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For the lateral flow testing kits (same swab method, but different test to PCR), the BMJ found that the sensitivity (True positive rate) dropped from 73% with healthcare staff to 58% with members of the public.

The evaluation found that the test performed best when used by laboratory scientists when the sensitivity was 79% (156/197 positive: 79.2% (95% confidence interval 72.8% to 84.6%)).

Sensitivity dropped to 73% when used by trained healthcare staff (92/126 positive: 73.0% (64.3% to 80.5%)) and to 58% with self-trained members of the public (214/372 positive: 57.5% (52.3% to 62.6%)).

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4469

PCR test have a much higher sensitivity to start with but presumably there will be a similar drop off due to a relatively poorer swabbing technique by the self-trained public.

Hmm, identical image appears to be doing the rounds.

Which now makes me suspicious about it.

Tune into Jack Monroe twitter for info around this. It looked genuine last night.

That's those left leaning social meejas amplifying a signal.

That's those left leaning social meejas amplifying a signal.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jan/12/not-good-enough-marcus-rashford-condemns-free-school-meal-packages

Just called to register my home testing kit and the whole call including pressing between options 1,2,3,4 took 10mins. Literally no waiting time. I am impressed.

Thanks. Very interesting.... I imagine that’s why there are no self-administered tests here.

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 what they are calling £30's worth of food ^^^^

The walk-in clinics are supervised, and when I did one I was encouraged to change the angle of approach into my brain to get a bit deeper

Not the one I did (Sobell, Islington). It was literally "here's a kit and an instruction poster and a folding table with a grotty makeup mirror. Let us know when you're done". I didn't get the feeling anyone there was medically trained.

In HK you get the testing kit from a vending machine in an MTR (tube) station and drop it off in a drop box.

Not the one I did (Sobell, Islington). It was literally "here's a kit and an instruction poster and a folding table with a grotty makeup mirror. Let us know when you're done". I didn't get the feeling anyone there was medically trained.

Interesting. I wonder how much the council is playing a role. The one I went to (Hackney Central) was set up similarly, except every station had someone supervising the testee. I don't think my person was a nurse or anything, but she seemed to be trained in the administration of this particular test.

(Thanks to being part of the ONS study...)

Having administered 30 odd nasal/throat swabs (not nasopharyngeal, just nasal), with 10 of those on myself, I'd say you'd have to be complete gibbering fuckwit in order to get it so wrong that it would be a false negative.

I did have the benefit of a nurse talking me through the first one (and standing watching me do all of the subsequent ones), but it wasn't anything other than I would have done anyway.

Lateral Flow Tests are a completely different ballgame though. Much more scope for screwing that up.

91,000 excess deaths last year over the 5 year norm

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55631693

In the LB Hillingdon the Council have made (currently underused) buildings available for the local NHS to set up, as either Testing (Beck Theatre), or Vaccination (Ruislip Young People's hall), centres.
No Council staff involved.

Nice of boris to flex the rules to the extent that I can get to my closest hill to run up and point to him if caught.

Well, GOV pay £30 to a mate and this is what comes back. The change is pocketed by the thieving little shit.

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.

If it's a choice between catching nothing and catching a large portion of asymptomatic cases, we should be doing the latter.

But then we look worse on the global stage. Better off doing little to no testing to reduce the number of cases