THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR
SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times which has won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.
BIG plans are afoot in Downing Street with policy after policy being released this week. First vaccine papers, now mass testing is to be made available for everybody.
Hundreds of millions of lateral flow devices (LFDs) will be sent out at a massive cost to the taxpayer.
In a way I admire the ambition but mass testing on this level comes with huge difficulties, especially using these kits. PCR tests are the gold-standard, LFDs are just not as accurate.
The risk of false negatives and false positives may look tiny but when you are testing millions and millions of times they will cause a huge issue. Also, you have to do it yourself – not everyone gets it right.
Estimates vary but even a minuscule percentage of false positives could mean the majority of positives detected aren’t true positives.
When prevalence of the virus is low mass testing is questionable, especially with LFDs. We could be wrongly trapping thousands of people in their homes when they are perfectly healthy.
False negatives are an issue as it could wrongly give someone who is potentially infectious confidence they are OK.
These are all serious considerations which it seems the Government has decided to push to the side in favour of the benefits. Of course, many cases will be detected that otherwise would have been missed.
Administering one of these tests is not a pleasant experience though and is easy to mess up. Lots to think about; it’s not as straightforward as it sounds.
The Government should focus on supporting those with symptoms to self-isolate. The financial help is not good enough and with the money for mass testing, a proper system could be developed to help people isolate.
That has been the real weakness throughout and yet not nearly enough has been done to rectify it.