Just got the negative test result back for youngest daughter, thanks for the best wishes fellas.
Back to school for them tomorrow and another chance to contract it!
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Just hearing that the reason for the testing backlogs is in the labs i.e the laboratory capacity is not there to cope with current numbers.
Anyone remember when the UK’s universities offered to help?
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I presume hospitals do their own in situ testing?
Thats probably down to the governments lack of planning again,making out they’ve been ontop of it but it’s down to others causing all the problems.
I wouldn’t be suprised if they ramped up testing to such a degree that the labs didn’t have the people,time or resources to cope with what the government were telling eveyone,so they put the blame on them to pass the buck again.
The UK government’s primarily aim was to drive up reportable metrics, not to improve actual operational testing capacity. The two don’t necessarily go together.
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yep
Just heard Matt Hancock flat out lie again in parliament over it.
"we have been prioritising care homes etc. " They haven’t
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For the last few months there has been discussion about the divergence between mortality and case number. Several explanations have been put forward, but none of them are that compelling by themselves, but a new idea that appears to be generating momentum is the idea that a large number of positive tests are in people with low enough viral loads that they are not infectious and is insufficient to get them sick.
The PCR test is typically thought of as not being quantitative, in that it only tells you if there is a detectable level of whatever you’re trying to measure, but that isn’t strictly true. There is a measure called the Cycle Threshold, which basically refers to how much work you need to do with the sample to get a positive result. The higher the CT the less of what you’re measuring is in the sample. We’re starting to see evidence now that a lot of positive tests have high CT values, meaning low viral load.
We dont yet know what this means for this specific infection or what a clinically relevant CT is, but it is an avenue that will likely start getting more attention moving forward and could push us into a completely new paradigm. Reading about this the last few days is about as positive as Ive felt about the situation since January. This is more of a game changer if it pans out than a vaccine or any of therapies that have been discussed. Imagine how different the situation will look if we can ignore 50% or more of the positive tests as being clinically irrelevant. That changes everything. It puts contact tracing back on the table as being a viable strategy for directing targeted quarantines, ir massively reduces the testing requirements required to do this and it allows for much more liberal return to normal in society.
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vat a spooooky, doooooky thought…
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See that’s your problem right there. You are looking at this from a USA/UK perspective where nothing, or at least very very little, is actually being done to contain the spread.
In most countries their governments are undertaking track and trace to identify all contact points and isolating them to ensure there is no transmission from these people if they are infected from the original party. For them, the issue has nothing to do with numbers per se but infections that cannot be traced back to an original contact point, which would signify the beginnings of community transmission.
While I was in Qld, Aus there were maybe 3 or 4 cases in the state a month, but all could be connected to international travel, a connection to an international traveler, or a connection to Victoria (which had community transmission).
Maybe there is a ‘trigger number’ in certain parts of the world, but from my experience of those governments that have handled this well (Qld gov) it’s all about doing their best to avoid infections of unknown source.
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This whole post is very well said. One of the issues we had in the US was when the outbreak was beginning on the West Coast it only took until about the 10th identified case before we found someone with no known positive contacts. That is the point at which the situation starts to rapidly deteriorate, and Im pretty sure that was the point I started telling everyone I knew that we were completely unprepared for what was about to happen and that it was going to get bad.
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UK testing is in complete disarray. We cannot meet demand and yet testing centres remain empty.
Given the back log which I understand is massive cases are likely to be far higher than being reported.
It’s ok, I’m expecting the government to say that they’ll be abandoning testing because they’ve come up with an algorithm.
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I doubt their algorithm could handle the 185k backlog in tests without a trip to Barnard Castle and input from Google.
Blatant plagiarism! 
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It now seems to be official policy to game the system. Dismayed testing centre staff are advising people to enter fraudulent postcodes to get a local test. It’s farcical.
The Governments response is just to keep saying our testing is the envy of the world. It’s Trumpian.
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Testing system here is suddenly under real pressure - 2 weeks ago it was an hour wait to get a test, yesterday it was 4-5 hours and people were turned away from joining the line by early afternoon. The writing was on the wall, and to be fair, investments were being made in expanded capacity - but not dramatic enough.
Of course, at least we have 7 testing centres in the immediate area…I think of the UK has being fairly small, but that Portsmouth-Aberdeen example is shocking.
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I don’t understand why the UK is struggling to cope with the testing? Didn’t they do many times more testing during the peak Corona situation?
It’s really very simple: we’re run by a bunch of complete imbeciles.
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Or maybe by a bunch of smart psychopaths. Let’s have a second wave which will take the eyes off the Brexit negotiations.
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