select search filters
briefings
roundups & rapid reactions
Fiona fox's blog
Matt Hancock, The Health Secretary, announced that COVID-19 test will now be made available for anyone above the age of 5 who shows symptoms.
Prof Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor in the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, University of Nottingham, said:
“This is a very welcome addition to the overall control strategy. This will link to the contact tracing part of the programme and the app. Currently we are isolating based only on symptoms in the majority of instances which means a lot of people who are advised to isolate do not need to. This addition solves this problem. The contact tracing app should be altered so that alerts are only sent to close contacts as a result of a positive test rather than the current plan of activation by an individual based solely on their symptoms. Many people have already had COVID-19 type illnesses and the next step will be for all these people to have an antibody test if they so wish. There is little point in track and trace on the antibody test as by the time antibodies are detectable most people will no longer be infectious nor will the people they have passed the virus on to.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
None received.