RE: Rapid home Covid tests cleared22 Dec 2020 15:43
Regulators have cleared rapid-result Covid-19 tests for use at home but set strict conditions on how they are to be deployed, it has been reported.
Boris Johnson’s hopes of avoiding months-long lockdowns rest in part on regulators approving lateral flow devices (LFDs) for wider use.
The Times revealed on Saturday that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) was blocking a plan to post tens of millions of tests to households.
The MHRA has now approved the tests, which give results in 30 minutes, for use at home by members of the public, according to the Financial Times.
However, it says the regulator has placed strict conditions on their use, which may severely limit their application as an alternative to social distancing measures.
“The MHRA is keen to emphasise, however, that the devices are allowed to be used only to ‘find’ cases of Covid-19 infections, so that people who were not aware they had the virus are able to isolate,” the FT reported. “They are not to be used to ‘enable’ people to make life decisions.”
Tens of millions of LFDs are being kept in warehouses in the UK at present and hundreds of millions more are on order.
They have been put forward by ministers variously as a way of helping regions come out of tougher lockdowns, enabling relatives to visit care home residents and most recently allowing schools to open on time in January.
There is fierce debate about whether they offer an appropriate level of confidence to make decisions about behaviour, however.
Initial evaluation of the lateral flow tests by the University of Oxford was positive, finding that they picked up 77 per cent of cases, rising to over 90 per cent of the most infectious.
However, accuracy fell from 79 per cent when used by laboratory scientists to 58 per cent when used by ordinary people without training, while real-world testing in Liverpool found the tests picked up only 49 per cent of cases.
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies concluded this month that “lateral flow testing should not be seen as a way on its own of enabling high-risk activities to take place but could reduce the risk of activities that are due to occur anyway”, according to minutes released yesterday.
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