Covid testing in Liverpool

At the beginning of November Liverpool, which has one of the highest rates of Covid-19 in England, became the first city to roll out mass testing of its population.

All people living or working in Liverpool are being offered Covid-19 tests regardless of whether they have symptoms as part of the Government’s pilot scheme that will screen as many as half a million people in the city. It will support the Government’s plans for mass screening throughout England.

These are the tests they’ve been using.

RT-PCR swab tests These are the standard nose and throat swabs and they look for the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus. These tests have been used to show whether a person with symptoms currently has Covid-19. They can produce a result in three to four hours, but can take longer if samples have to be sent to external laboratories.

Lateral flow tests These also use nose and throat swabs and test for the presence of the virus but use a kit. They detect the virus directly because these small, portable tests give a result like a pregnancy test in 15-30 minutes, without the need of a lab. An independent evaluation of one test (the SD Biosensor test) found it is 99.3% specific.

LAMP This is short for Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification and is a new type of technology used for large volumes of tests to be processed in hospital laboratories. It also involves collecting nose or throat swabs and detects viral RNA, but samples from mucus produced by hard coughing can also be used. It gives results in two to three hours but it’s not as sensitive as the other two.