September 3, 2020

expert reaction to announcement of £500 million to fund trials of rapid COVID-19 tests

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced £500 million to fund trials of rapid COVID-19 tests.

Dr Joshua Moon, Research Fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

“Rapid tests are a good thing in general and, if they have the same reliability and accuracy as the PCR test, have the potential to be of real benefit to the response.

“The key, however, is to remember that these tests exist within a whole system of response rather than being the sole component.

“Having a rapid test is useless if positive cases can’t or won’t isolate because support and enforcement is absent or if contacts can’t be identified because the tracing system is overwhelmed.

“As such, while a rapid test is a useful thing to have, it needs to be supported by a whole system of policies and strategies around contact tracing, case and contact isolation, support for those self-isolating, and evaluation of the system itself to ensure better functioning as the pandemic continues.”

Prof Lawrence Young, Virologist and Professor of Molecular Oncology, University of Warwick, said:

“Rapid testing for coronavirus infection has the potential to quickly identify infected individuals and operate a more efficient test and trace process.

“This is particularly important as we head into winter as one of these tests being trialled – the LamPORE test from Oxford Nanpore – can also detect other winter virus infections such as flu. This means that the right advice and treatments can be targeted to the right patients. But these tests have to be thoroughly validated and benchmarked to the currently approved tests that are in routine use. The hope is that a combination of these new rapid tests and the ability to use saliva (spit test) instead of swabs will result in the ability to process more tests per day and even consider the possibility of more widespread universal testing – testing individuals without symptoms to further reduce the chains of transmission.”

Press Release from the Department of Health and Social Care, published on Thursday 3 September:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/500-million-funding-for-quick-result-covid-19-test-trials

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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