General Chat

Mr Owl has to use lateral flow tests twice a week as he works in construction. A false positive or negative could have ended up shutting down several building sites. Now he’s changed jobs it would just be one but either way it could lives, money etc.

Why don't they just use tests that work but take them more often?
They could, perhaps, employ more people to analyse the tests,
for a quicker result.

The possibility of a false negative is much more worrying.

Lateral flow are supposed to be for people who don’t have symptoms.

If you get a positive result you get a PCR test to confirm.

Out here if it's a positive on a flow test it is checked by a different test.

How much taxpayer's money has been spent on this - yet again - useless piece of 'kit'?
More than a £billion.
It's no surprise, by now, that the firm(s) that were offered the contract (s), with no tender process were, yet again, Tory donors!!!

a repairman was called to a care home, upon which he was asked to do a lateral flow test...thinking on, he declined, on the grounds that a false positive, would virtually ground all his family..

I find this confusing. a report says that around a third of positive lateral flow test results when tested prove to be actually negative. so how can we believe the statistics thrown at us? Are all these false positives counted in the figures before being re-tested? :-S