註1) Coronavirus: Testing and why it matters https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51943612
- The tests currently being used in UK hospitals are to see if somebody currently has Covid-19.
These are done by taking a swab of the nose or throat, which is sent off to a lab to look for signs of the virus's genetic material.
The other type of test the government wants to use is an antibody test. These are done to see if someone has already had the virus.
So far, antibody tests have not proved to be as reliable.
- Health Secretary Matt Hancock said last week that 15 of the most promising antibody tests had been tested, but none was good enough.
Prof John Newton, who is overseeing testing, told The Times that tests bought from China had been able to identify antibodies in patients who had been seriously ill with coronavirus, but didn't pick up the milder cases.
- Health Secretary Matt Hancock said: "We have the best scientific labs in the world but we did not have the scale. My German counterpart for instance could call upon 100 testing labs ready and waiting when the crisis struck."
At first, Public Health England was only using its own eight laboratories. This has been expanded to 40 NHS labs - so, 48 labs in total.
South Korea, which has been able to test far more widely than the UK has, acted very quickly to approve the production of testing kits, allowing it to build up a stockpile.
Despite having a slightly smaller population than the UK, it has twice as many labs and about two-and-a-half times the weekly testing capacity.
Germany has carried out more than three times as many tests as the UK.
By 27 March, it had tested 1,096 per 100,000 citizens, while as of 1 April, the UK had tested 348 per 100,000 of the population.
That compares with 895 per 100,000 for Italy, 842 per 100,000 for South Korea, 348 per 100,000 for USA and 27 per 100,000 for Japan.
註2) How does a coronavirus antibody home test kit work, and how do I get one? https://theunionjournal.com/how- ... d-how-do-i-get-one/
Who can get a coronavirus home test?
In concept, anybody would certainly have the ability to get a test from Amazon orBoots Last month, the Government purchased 3.5 million fingerprick examinations, primarily from Chinese producers, and later on put provisionary orders for 17.5 million examinations from 9 companies consisting of some based in the UK.
None of the examinations were discovered by Oxford to be trusted sufficient for mass usage.
註3) False positives undermine corona antibody tests: Experts http://saudigazette.com.sa/artic ... ibody-tests-Experts
This week, the UK’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that no G7 country has yet developed a test that could say with certainty whether a person who recovered from coronavirus was immune.
註4) Coronavirus (COVID-19): scaling up our testing programmes https://www.gov.uk/government/pu ... -testing-programmes
These antibody tests are brand new. In fact, they are still being developed and there is not yet one that has been proven to work as we would require. No government in the world has yet rolled out a full COVID-19 antibody testing programme.
We are currently engaged with several companies and are urgently testing the quality, accuracy and effectiveness of potential tests with scientific experts and regulators. We have bought some antibody testing kit stock on the basis of minimum initial volumes to enable clinical testing. If the outcome of this is that the antibody tests do not work, no further tests will be purchased and, where possible, orders will be cancelled.
[update]
註5)Coronavirus 'game changer' testing kits could be unreliable, UK scientists say https://www.theguardian.com/worl ... e-uk-scientists-say
- A senior UK scientist who is working on lab-based antibody testing for Covid-19, said that given the current state of knowledge he was “amazed the government had sufficient confidence” to go ahead with the purchase of millions of tests. “A lot of us did a double-take,” he said.
- Dr David Ho, a leading infectious disease specialist at Columbia University in New York, said that, based on patient samples analysed by his team, those with severe illness tend to develop a faster and stronger antibody response. In people with milder symptoms, the presence of antibodies in the blood tends to ramp up more slowly, meaning that tests need to performed later.
“The problem is after a couple of weeks, the detection rate remains at about 50%-60%, especially in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases,” Ho said. “But this may not be a fault of the tests, because even using more sensitive methods in the lab we can see the antibody levels are quite low.”
/https://img.discuss.com.hk/d/attachments/day_240415/20240415_14b0f84ca25c2029416erWopQW8EJpcR.jpg)
