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Doubts over 'rapid turnaround' Covid tests pledged by Johnson

The “rapid turnaround” coronavirus tests the prime minister announced on Saturday are not approved for the public to interpret themselves without an expert’s help and so will not provide results in the promised 15 minutes, the Guardian has learned.

Boris Johnson’s briefing about this week’s national lockdown in England included the promise of a mass rollout of “tests that you can use yourself to tell whether or not you are infectious and get the result within 10 to 15 minutes”, which would be made available at universities and across whole cities.

Three of these rapid antigen tests, called lateral flow tests, have passed an assessment by Porton Down with Oxford University. The government has bought one of them. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced the government had signed a deal for 20 million, from the company Innova Tried and Tested, on 19 October.

But the Innova tests are not for people without symptoms, such as university students or people wanting to get on a plane or go to the theatre. They are designed for people who already have Covid symptoms. And the devices, which look like a pregnancy test, are intended to be read by a healthcare professional.
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“There are real issues in what people are being told in these studies,” he said. There was no transparency around the assessment of the lateral flow tests, he said. The announcement that the three tests had passed did not explain how they were assessed or how well they performed.

While everyone agrees that lateral flow tests, which could use either swab samples from the nose and mouth or saliva, have huge promise, Deeks said the technology at the moment appeared to struggle to register low levels of virus. They may pick up people who are infected and have high virus levels and may have symptoms, but they tend to miss people who are asymptomatic, as many young and fit people are.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/02/doubts-over-rapid-turnaround-covid-tests-pledged-by-johnson