Financial Times - Editorial - calls for mass testing with LFT!!8 Sep 2020 14:39
Pretty big - will ensure the approach is nailed on with policy makers now!
"For months, the only silver bullets against the menace of the coronavirus pandemic have been seen to be a vaccine or effective treatment. But there is another way in which Covid-19 can be, if not shot through the heart, then at least subdued: mass testing. Government peregrinations over testing, especially in the two big economies with the weakest records on virus handling — Britain and the US — have given it a chequered image. As the northern winter looms, however, and with an increase in coronavirus cases in the UK and elsewhere, governments everywhere should be doing all they can not just to expand existing programmes but to embrace and develop new testing technologies.
[...]
At least half a dozen companies, however, are working on cheap, self-administered saliva tests using paper strips that show a marker if the virus is found, similar to a pregnancy test. The drawback is they are less sensitive than gold-standard PCR tests, only returning a positive result for perhaps 85 per cent of infected people. Regulators often approve only the most sensitive tests for a disease. Yet a growing body of medical opinion suggests that the volume and frequency that cheap self-testing would permit more than compensates, overall, for higher false positives or negatives. A positive saliva test indicator could be followed by a PCR test, with people going into isolation if that confirms the result.
Scaling up such testing to allow entire populations to screen themselves, say, once a week would still cost billions of dollars — but would be cheaper than the cost of large-scale lockdowns. Employers might be ready to fund or part-fund testing of employees or, where appropriate, their customers. In coronavirus testing, the best should not be the enemy of the good, if “good” tests can be cheaply mass-produced and administered. Going down this route offers the best hope — without a vaccine — of returning to something closer to normal life."
https://www.ft.com/content/2e3c2f5e-e15b-4e0f-9a45-71e804e75135
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