The Guardian reports this morning that:
Senior government officials have raised “urgent” concerns about the mass expansion of rapid coronavirus testing, estimating that as few as 2% to 10% of positive results may be accurate in places with low Covid rates, such as London.
They add that:
Boris Johnson last week urged everyone in England to take two rapid-turnaround tests a week in the biggest expansion of the multibillion-pound testing programme to date.
The weird thing about this story is that it is a story. The absurdly high failure rate of these lateral flow tests has been known for some time. They are not even clinically licenced for use in the way the government is using them. It was, therefore, always certain that they would be of absolutely no use, but cost a lot. The only surprising thing about this story is that ministers did not, supposedly, know this.
Or, did they? Could it just be that someone, somewhere was profiting very nicely from this useless exercise that has almost no real impact on public health and that was more important than that fact that they have no evidence base for being useful for the purpose they are being used for?
I apologise for my cynicism, but not a lot. When it comes to this government the default position now has to be to ask who within it is gaining from any decision made and if any explanation for any action is sought. Corruption is to the fore. It is time to acknowledge the fact.
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Time some M.Ps went to prison for fraud ! Do we no longer have a Serious Fraud Squad Amongst the police ?
It could well be that lateral flow tests, intrinsically, are very poor at doing what they are claimed to. I don’t know enough to be able to make an informed comment on that.
Just for a moment, though, let us suppose that they are actually quite good, but not perfect, with a 99% success rate .We have 1% false positives and 1% false negatives. If the general infection rate is high then this is a test worth having. But say its only1% of the population. So if we test 100 people we’ll probably pick up the one person who is infected but we’ll also have one false positive. So the accuracy of the test will then be only 50%. Someone will probably argue that this is just what you’d expect if you tossed a coin but this is obviously not correct. You can’t pick up the one infected person by tossing a coin.
The lower the infection rate the worse the test appears to be.
The question that keeps popping up in my mind is ‘Do those who vote Tory know about this and if they do or, for those who don’t know, did would it change how they would vote?’
I honestly think that many would still vote for them. I do wonder what will be the tipping point, what will cause the country as a whole to turn on this incompetent, corrupt bunch who get called the government?
Craig
Given the record of the past year, your cynicism as entirely apt .This should be subject to a judicial review, or some other accuntability process. They rejected their own advisers on Sept 21 knowing it would mean tens of thousands of their own citizens dying. This seems more of the same – presumably these useless tests are to use up more of the £37bn they have budgetted for ‘Test&Trace’ – Serco. Deloitte et al. It’s demonstrably not a serious exercise – they are still not supporting people with a postive result to self isolate.
The goodly Reverend Bayes became a household name in mathematics by deducing a very simple formula 300 years ago that allows accurate calculation of the probability of false positives. All we need in order to be able to perform this simple calculation is the stated Sensitivity and Specificity of the tests and a reasonable estimation of the infection prevalence in the population. All of these are known so any numerate individual can work it out.
So either there are no numerate people in government or they did the sums then ignored the results for some reason.