MASS TESTING ‘WILL BE A DISASTER’

False positives mean thousands will be forced to isolate needlessly, warns academic

REGULAR Covid testing will result in a ‘public health disaster’ with thousands forced needlessly to selfisolate, an academic has warned.

Officials hope the multi-billion-pound scheme, under which everyone in England will be invited to take two free tests a week, will help to ease the country out of lockdown safely.

The Prime Minister insisted it will ‘stop outbreaks in their tracks’ and is necessary to ensure that the sacrifices made in recent months ‘are not wasted’.

But Allyson Pollock, a professor of public health at Newcastle University, warned the rollout of mass testing is ‘going to do more harm than good’. Branding it a ‘scandalous waste of money’, she said regular testing when cases were low would result in more false positives than actual cases, forcing people to self-isolate unnecessarily.

Her argument was backed up by a review of all studies into lateral flow tests – the type that would be used – which suggests the country is already at the level where there may be more false than true positives.

‘The Government is rolling this out without any good evidence of the cost, the harms or the benefits,’ Professor Pollock told LBC radio.

‘Lateral flow tests are a problem because they miss people. Cases are falling to rock bottom now – the majority of cases will be false positives and that will result in people having to isolate unnecessarily.’

She added: ‘It’s giving a lot of money to commercial companies where the tests have not been evaluated and piloted in proper public health settings. This is a public health disaster.’

Government experts are satisfied the DIY swabs, widely used by schools, care homes and the NHS, are a key tool in reopening society.

The tests are said to have identified 120,000 cases that might not otherwise have been picked up.

From Friday, people will be able to request packs of test kits for home use to collect from a pharmacy, or be tested at council-run sites or in workplace schemes.

Taking 15 to 30 minutes to produce a result, they are faster, cheaper and easier to use than the ‘gold standard’ PCR (polymerase chain reaction) laboratory tests.

Ministers have agreed anyone testing positive will be offered a PCR test to confirm the result. But critics fear LFTs are not sensitive enough to be relied on, particularly in detecting the asymptomatic cases that make the virus so difficult to control.

Last month, a major review of 64 studies found that the rapid antigen tests correctly identified an average of 72 per cent of infected people, falling to 58 per cent of asymptomatic cases.

When infection rates were low in the community, the tests picked up far more ‘false positives’ than positive samples.

Speaking last month, Jon Deeks, professor of biostatistics at the University of Birmingham, said: ‘One of the issues which should have been picked up is these tests work a lot less well in people who are asymptomatic.’ He described using the tests every week on the entire population as ‘beyond reckless’.

Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser to Test and Trace, said ‘the risk of false positives is extremely low – less than one in 1,000’.

Boris Johnson told the No 10 briefing last night testing ‘will be a great advantage to us all’.

‘Stop outbreaks in their tracks’