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government planning even more asymptomatic testing (screening) of people with no symptoms using lateral flow testing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55604677 this may not be a good thing. may even be a bad policy....
screening is always mixture of pros and cons. is never perfect. the balance of risks must be known to be mitigated. unless properly tested and outcomes of real life importance are used, it may be just be throwing resources away while seeming to do something useful,
here, we need to know; does testing result in less harm from covid to individual/community? or does it produce behaviour change from a false sense of security, by individuals or employers, that actually increases spread through false negatives?
we don't know. the sensible thing would be to do a trial, and have the UK National Screening Committee independenly assess all the evidence on it; as far as I can see there are no trials planned. nevertheless the UK gov spent 496 million pounds lateral flow tests
that's 496 million pounds. how accurate are they? https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/12/01/margaret-mccartney-christmas-covid-19-testing-for-students-needs-independent-oversight/
a: not very. they miss about 50% infections and 30% people with high viral loads https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/community-testing-explainer/community-testing-a-guide-for-local-delivery#what-the-community-testing-programme-is
further, if people at highest risk don't come forward (because they can't afford too self isolate and quarantine household) the testing is not going to reach the people where testing would be of highest benefit. and if testing still results in less than 20% people
/self isolating then we may be putting our resources in the wrong basket. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.15.20191957v1
does this strategy work? don't know. needs properly tested, independently scrutinised, and assessed for cost effectiveness. need to pivot: what helps people isolate effectively? what resources needed, and how? AND how do we reduce inequalities - hugely worrying.
