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A randomly selected group of 100,000 people in England will be screened for Covid-19 in an attempt to quantify if the virus’s transmission levels are low enough to get out of the block.
The tests next week will provide a national snapshot of the proportion of people infected with the virus before a planned review of the restrictions on May 7.
Prof Ara Darzi, the The director of the Institute for Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London, which is conducting the study with pollster Ipsos Mori, said that, with the exception of one vaccine, testing was the only way out of the shutdown.
“But the testing landscape is like the Wild West with no rules, no standards and very variable reliability.” “With this ambitious program, the largest in England, our goal is to establish a viable testing program that the government can trust.”
The 100,000 people, selected from 315 local authorities across England, will be invited to conduct home tests that will show if they are currently infected with the coronavirus. The team plans to repeat the exercise in four to six weeks, or at a time when closure restrictions are eased, to capture early signs that a resurgence is occurring.
“Large numbers are needed to ensure that low levels of the virus are found in the community,” said Professor Graham Cooke, a member of the Imperial College team.
In the second part of the program, different antibody tests will be evaluated to determine their accuracy and ease of use at home. The tests will be performed first on Imperial Healthcare volunteers. NHS Trust, known to have had the virus, to establish its accuracy. Three hundred public volunteers will also receive a sample test for self-administration, requiring them to put a blood sample in a cassette, add a dye, and read the result, to assess how well people can perform the tests at home.
Initially, only patients in the hospital could be tested in the UK. The tests were then expanded to include NHS staff and home care staff. Now up to 10 million essential workers and their families showing coronavirus symptoms can request a test through a government website.
The essential worker list is the same one used to allow the children of key workers to continue going to school during closure. In addition to health and social work personnel, the list includes teachers, judges, some lawyers, religious personnel, and journalists who provide public broadcasting services.
Also included are local public officials, the police, armed service personnel, fire and rescue service personnel, immigration officers, and prison and probation personnel. Some of the private sector staff also qualify, including veterinarians, food production, essential financial services and information technology, as well as those working in the oil, gas, electricity and water sectors.
Matthew Weaver
If the tests are shown to be accurate and usable enough, they will be distributed to larger cohorts, with the potential to extend the antibody test to 100,000 people later this year, to provide an indication of the prevalence of Covid immunity. 19.
Previously, the government had raised the possibility of making antibody tests available to the public through Boots and Amazon, and had ordered millions of commercial kits.
He had to backtrack on this proposal after the best-performing of these only picked up antibodies about 70% of the time. However, Cooke said some of the evaluations of the accuracy of these tests may have been overly pessimistic, because laboratory-stored serum was used, rather than blood samples taken directly from individuals.
He added that some of the tests might not be sensitive enough to provide results for people, but they could still provide a broad picture of what proportion of the population had been infected.
James Bethell, Minister of Health, said: “Understanding more about the current spread of the coronavirus and the prevalence of antibodies is a vital part of our continued response to this pandemic. This ambitious new testing program will help us track the infection rate now.
“And most importantly, it will help identify an antibody test that is accurate and easy to use, and that can give us an indication of how many people have already had the infection. This information will inform future actions we take to control the spread of the virus, including the development of new tests and treatments. “
