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The letter, published in the BMJ, states: “It is undisputed that lateral flow tests (LFDs) cannot detect the lower levels of virus among individuals in early infection. There is a high chance that infected contacts in a classroom may be infectious before they are detected as positive by a LFD test.”
The scientists said they were also concerned that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently banned the Innova lateral flow test that is being used in schools, citing risk to health and “further spread of the virus”.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said yesterday it had reassessed the Innova test following the FDA ban and extended approval until August.
Graeme Tunbridge, the MHRA director of devices, said: “We have now concluded our review of the risk assessment and are satisfied that no further action is necessary or advisable at this time.”
However, the Royal Statistical Society said the regulators’ assessment needed to extend beyond physical safety to the consequences of false positives and false negatives.
“The full range of consequences, from liberalised behaviour to deprivation of liberty, should be considered,” it said.
Around 19,000 infections were picked up by lateral flow devices in secondary school pupils between March and June, but despite new guidelines saying cases must be confirmed with a PCR test, only half were checked.
Of the 9,546 that were checked, nearly one third came back negative, meaning almost 3,000 tests had to be removed from the reported figures.
Experts warned that false positives made tracking the pandemic harder.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said: “In evidence-based medicine we call this a problem of noise, and it’s difficult to see what is really going on amid this noise.
“I would be ignoring lateral flow testing and be focusing on PCR positivity to get a true picture of the pandemic, and that shows cases are only going up in small incremental measures.”
An education department spokesman said daily contact testing as a replacement for self-isolation would be reviewed at the end of June. The Department of Health did not comment.
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard opines without the facts.
From the DT: Professor suggests impact of virus on education could be reason for rolling out vaccine to children
Sarah KnaptonHarry de Quetteville
CORONAVIRUS testing in schools is hugely disruptive and should be suspended, experts have said, as it emerged that up to 60 per cent of “positive” tests a week are coming back negative when checked.
Under plans to keep schools open, more than 50?million lateral flow tests have been carried out on youngsters leading to thousands of pupils and their social bubbles being forced to self-isolate for 10 days.
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But analysis of Test and Trace data by The Daily Telegraph shows that in secondary schools, one third of lateral flow tests checked against the gold-standard Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test have come back negative. In one week in March, it rose to 60 per cent.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, who led the Oxford vaccine programme, warned that mass testing was leading to such huge disruption in schools that it might be worth vaccinating youngsters in order to stop the chaos.
“If children are not severely affected, if they’re not major drivers of transmission, the testing itself is picking up lots of cases, causing classes to be sent home and so on,” he said.
“We’ve got to get to a point where we’re not impacting on education. And I think that impact on education could be a reason for vaccination.”
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is currently deciding whether to recommend jabs for children, amid fears the risk may outweigh the benefit.
Children and teenagers have been disproportionately hit by measures to control the pandemic despite being largely unaffected by the virus. Many have had exams cancelled, and have been forced to study away from their peers for months on end, putting their mental health and socialisation at risk. Yesterday, 23 British academics from universities including Oxford, Cambridge and University College London, wrote to Gavin Williamson, the Education Secretary, warning that lateral flow testing posed a danger for schools.
They are particularly concerned that contact tracing trials could spark a wave of new infections, and have called for them to be suspended.
Currently, 170 schools and colleges across England are taking part in the trials in which students no longer need to self-isolate when a close contact tests positive, if they themselves test negative using a lateral flow test.
But there have been concerns that as well as throwing up false positives, lateral flow devices miss large numbers of true positives. A pilot last year in Liverpool found they failed to spot positive cases around 50 per cent of the time.
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We’re not using LFT’s as they should be. They’re a blunt instrument at the moment - Innova works for this.
We sit here with mega amounts of detail on how they are best used, and where they offer genuine salvation. When the media triumphantly exclaim how LFT’s allow a family to escape jail time and fly to Spain, they’ll be viewed as we do.
Let the politics play out. Have faith in the product, more so the company.
If you google "Daily Telegraph scrap school covid tests" it should produce a link to the DT article.
It is very damaging to Innova, but also possibly for LFTs generally, which would be a shame.
Surprised this hasn't had more attention on this board.
It says that DT analysed track and trace info which showed 1/3 of (presumably positive) LFTs came back negative when checked by PCR.
If that's the case (I don't subscribe to DT so only saw the front page on BBC) then Innova's real world specificity is much poorer than claimed by Innova, Porton Down and the Liverpool study.
Based on the Liverpool study Innova has an in the field sensitivity of 57%-79% depending on who's administering the test and specificity of 99.7% (Porton Down) or approx 66% on secondary school kids (Daily Telegraph).
If correct I wonder how much of the drop in performance is due to the EUA allowing it to be AN rather than NP though I would have thought that would more likely affect sensitivity more than specificity?
In a nutshell, LFTs give false positives and negatives, so let's stop using LFTs.
Where the hell was the reference to the fact they're cheap Chinese tat what we're using, let's buy British quality?!?
It's like they haven't read any of the messages we've been bombarding them with.