Mass rollout of rapid result tests ‘crazy and dysfunctional’

THE GOVERNMENT’S mass rollout of rapid result coronavirus tests is “dysfunctional” and “crazy”, an expert has said.

Dr Angela Raffle, honorary senior lecturer in community medicine at the University of Bristol Medical School, argued the Test and Trace programme needs to be rebuilt to link with local health and social services and to focus on where the risk is greatest.

She warned that extensive use of lateral flow tests, which can return results in 30 minutes, when Covid-19 prevalence was low was a waste of resources and could result in problems such as higher numbers of false positives.

Dr Raffle said the use of athome rapid tests should be paused, while more research information was collected through trials. Her comments come amid reports that officials have raised concerns about the accuracy of the rapid tests.

The Guardian newspaper said it had seen emails which showed senior officials were considering rolling back large-scale asymptomatic testing due to the number of false positives.

Commenting on the reports, Dr Raffle, who is also a consultant to the UK National Screening Programmes, said: “That’s a phenomenon that anybody who knows about this stuff has been predicting will happen. Once you start testing people who are at very low risk, then even a good test will throw up more false alarms than genuine positives,”

A Downing Street spokesman said: “Lateral flow tests have been rigorously evaluated and we believe that they are both accurate and incredibly useful in terms of being able to spot asymptomatic cases of the virus. We know now this can be one in three people and it therefore allows us to identify possible contacts of those people and ultimately helps us to reduce the spread and the transmission of the virus.”