Government emails cast doubt on school LFT plans15 Jan 2021 09:47
Pupils and teachers in England used to have to self-isolate if they had come into close contact with someone with confirmed covid.
Now those without symptoms can avoid quarantine if they agree to seven daily “lateral flow” tests, which give results in around 30 minutes. They only need to self-isolate if they test positive or develop symptoms as the week progresses.
Schools have already been given official guidance to start the new scheme, called “daily contact testing”, as a way of increasing face-to-face teaching.
But the Department of Health sent FactCheck an email on Tuesday evening which stated: “This programme is still a pilot at this stage and we will only roll this out once it has been deemed clinically safe and approved by the regulator.”
In an “updated” statement issued less than four hours later, this line and any reference to “pilots” were removed – and the Department has not given us an explanation why.
So while the scheme took effect on 4 January, it’s not clear whether the Department got the safety assurances and regulatory approval it said it needed beforehand.
And we don’t know whether the pilots that were carried out answered the vital question of whether the new plan might actually increase the spread of the virus.
‘Increase in transmission risk’
As FactCheck reported last month – and as the government has since confirmed – lateral flow tests only pick up around 60 per cent of cases when carried out by non-experts, though the chances of catching a positive case may improve with repeated tests.
When the possibility of replacing quarantine for contacts of anyone who tests positive with daily lateral flow tests was discussed at SAGE in mid-November, the scientists warned that it carried “a small increase in transmission risk”.
The fear was that even repeated testing might allow some positive cases to slip through, so the policy would not be as effective as making people self-isolate after coming into contact with a confirmed covid case.
The experts from SAGE urged ministers to carry out pilots before changing policy. They said the pilot “should enable evaluation of the potential of the system against different desired outcomes (e.g. reductions in the current quarantine period to enable people to get back to work, reductions in transmission, behavioural outcomes such as adherence to self-isolation), and to understand operational issues”.
The Department of Health and Social Care told FactCheck that it trialled daily contact testing in 12 schools in England and two in Northern Ireland.
It told us that the pilots looked at the practical elements of rolling of the programme.
But despite repeated requests, the government hasn’t provided us with any evidence that the pilots looked at the effect of the scheme on virus transmission.
Has it been ‘deemed clinically safe’?
We first approached the Department on Monday with questions about the evidence for the new policy.
It issued the following sta
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