Page 9 - Jon Deeks News Today

Concerns have resurfaced amid calls from France to use gold standard PCR tests at the border 22 December 2020 • 5:54pm Boris Johnson views a PCR diagnostics machine in a lab during a visit to the Public Health England site at Porton Down science park on November 27 Credit: Adrian Dennis - WPA Pool French demands for “gold standard” PCR tests to be used at the border come amid fears that the accuracy of lateral flow tests “cannot be relied on”. Both tests are diagnostics that tell indi...

The Prime Minister has said the Government wants secondary school pupils to return to lessons in a staggered way in the new year if they “possibly can”. He said the “commonsensical thing to do” was to follow the path of the epidemic. Labour’s letter to the Education Secretary calls on the Government to publish scientific evidence on the spread of the virus in schools and colleges – and the risk this poses to students, staff and the community. It demands that the Government puts in p...

Rapid coronavirus tests that Britain spent more than £600million on could pick up as few as three per cent of people infected with the virus, a study has suggested. A trial of the Innova Tried & Tested lateral flow test on students at the University of Birmingham raises some serious questions about the value of mass-testing. The rapid test, which can produce results within 15 minutes and is being widely used in the first phases of Operation Moonshot to test asymptomatic people and curb the spr...

Uni students with Covid may have wrongly received negative test results due to “rushed” and “inaccurate” testing ahead of the Christmas break, a University of Birmingham study has discovered. Results from the study showed that lateral flow tests conducted on Birmingham students had missed positive Covid test results, which were discovered when students were retested with another testing method. The study shows that only 3 per cent of Covid cases were correctly identified. Lateral flow t...

January school closures considered as fears grow over new Covid strains spread among children Government scientists concerned that children may be fuelling fresh surge of virus across the country 21 December 2020 • 9:30pm Minister are considering keeping schools closed for all of January amid fears that the new Covid-19 strain is spreading faster among children, The Telegraph understands. Government scientists said they were concerned that children may be fuelling a new surge of the virus acr...

The case for mass Covid screening in schools has not been made Every attempt to keep schools open is to be cheered but screening programmes have ethical and evidential issues that must be addressed Screen test: a young girl is checked for Coronavirus in Germany Credit: Getty Images “If screening is worth doing, it’s worth doing correctly.”  So says screening expert Margaret McCartney, explaining in the BMJ that mass screening programmes can generate harms as well as benefits.  This is...

Test, treat, isolate and support Mohsen Shahmanesh examines the effectiveness, safety and likely take-up of the Covid vaccines So we now have a vaccine against Covid-19. To be exact, in the UK we have one approved vaccine, two more ready for submission for approval and many more in the pipeline. We are clearly entering a new era. But can we talk of a post-Covid era? Let us demystify the mystique surrounding this moment. What do the vaccines do? What do the figures bandied about mean? What do we...