The Lemon Fool

BigB wrote: I'm guessing it is based on reported LFTs +PCRs then, as opposed to distributed LFTs + PCRs. Most of our LFTs are unreported. If so, the figure would be somewhat higher than 274 million.

I have to do a lateral flow test tonight, at the request of the school which I am visiting on Saturday. I have just read the instruction booklet which clearly tells you to report any test, positive, negative or void.

They do say that your test is not complete until you have reported the result. Presumably they keep a check on who has which test, so unreported tests should show up in their records as gaps in the list if you subsequently report one.

TJH

tjh290633 wrote:

BigB wrote:I'm guessing it is based on reported LFTs +PCRs then, as opposed to distributed LFTs + PCRs. Most of our LFTs are unreported. If so, the figure would be somewhat higher than 274 million.

I have to do a lateral flow test tonight, at the request of the school which I am visiting on Saturday. I have just read the instruction booklet which clearly tells you to report any test, positive, negative or void.

They do say that your test is not complete until you have reported the result. Presumably they keep a check on who has which test, so unreported tests should show up in their records as gaps in the list if you subsequently report one.

How would the school know if you had had tests that you did not report to them? Or is the school supplying the tests and paying for them?

Lootman wrote: How would the school know if you had had tests that you did not report to them? Or is the school supplying the tests and paying for them?

I gather that the serial numbers of the tests issued are recorded against the name of the person to whom they were issued.

The instructions are to report the results to the NHS.

TJH

Everyone in this household has been tested. My wife as a healthcare worker is tested twice a week as a requirement for her work (plus ad hoc tests when necessary). My children need to be tested when they are unwell so as not to endanger their classmates at school. I have been unwell with respiratory infections twice during the pandemic and needed to be tested. So far we have been lucky and none of us have had COVID although my wife sees a lot of it at work in patients and staff. She had all her patients cancel with COVID as a justification one day this week!

Ultimately I guess that adds up to a lot of people through work or other reasons doing multiple tests to try to reduce unnecessary spread of the virus.

We are going to my niece's wedding in a week's time. All 100 guests have been instructed to take lateral flow tests the day before and prove it by emailing in a photo of the test result etc. One of the guests is the 94 year old grandmother of the groom. The tests are to protect vulnerable people like her (and us though we are not quite that old!). One can understand the large number of tests being done!

scrumpyjack wrote:We are going to my niece's wedding in a week's time. All 100 guests have been instructed to take lateral flow tests the day before and prove it by emailing in a photo of the test result etc. One of the guests is the 94 year old grandmother of the groom. The tests are to protect vulnerable people like her (and us though we are not quite that old!). One can understand the large number of tests being done!

I cannot help but feel that this is all getting a bit out of hand. Surely the point of being fully vaccinated is to not need so much testing for every little thing?

Lootman wrote:

scrumpyjack wrote:We are going to my niece's wedding in a week's time. All 100 guests have been instructed to take lateral flow tests the day before and prove it by emailing in a photo of the test result etc. One of the guests is the 94 year old grandmother of the groom. The tests are to protect vulnerable people like her (and us though we are not quite that old!). One can understand the large number of tests being done!

I cannot help but feel that this is all getting a bit out of hand. Surely the point of being fully vaccinated is to not need so much testing for every little thing?

I agree. It would be much better to increase focus on how to avoid spreading the disease (i.e. not having an indoor gathering of 100 people!) rather than continual testing. Possibly anecdotal, but there was a lot of talk recently about festival entrance sites being littered with positive tests, because attendees with positive tests threw them away and got their negative-tested mates to take another test and give it to them.

If you can prove you're double-jabbed, you're in. If not, you're barred. Simple enough.

zico wrote:

Lootman wrote: I cannot help but feel that this is all getting a bit out of hand. Surely the point of being fully vaccinated is to not need so much testing for every little thing?

I agree. It would be much better to increase focus on how to avoid spreading the disease (i.e. not having an indoor gathering of 100 people!) rather than continual testing. Possibly anecdotal, but there was a lot of talk recently about festival entrance sites being littered with positive tests, because attendees with positive tests threw them away and got their negative-tested mates to take another test and give it to them.

If you can prove you're double-jabbed, you're in. If not, you're barred. Simple enough.

Yeah, my wife's dentist has switched from a policy of requiring a negative test result for each visit to requiring sight of her vaccination card just once.

If you are not vaccinated then you still need the negative test result. Seems reasonable to me.

tjh290633 wrote:

Lootman wrote: How would the school know if you had had tests that you did not report to them? Or is the school supplying the tests and paying for them?

I gather that the serial numbers of the tests issued are recorded against the name of the person to whom they were issued.

The instructions are to report the results to the NHS.

TJH

That might be the theory, and it might be true for guided lateral flow tests and the schools' LFTs, but in many cases they are just handed out freely by the box by local authorities. The serial numbers recorded are just batches, not individual unique ids for each test.

We report tests results where explicitly required to gain entry, or would do if we'd had a positive (not one so far), but mostly we're using them for our own info and not reporting the tests. I think there will be many such tests not yet counted, but there will be a large number of distributed LFTs in addition to test result numbers.

Lootman wrote: If you are not vaccinated then you still need the negative test result. Seems reasonable to me.

If you're not vaccinated, you shouldn't be near other people, except for like-minded anti-vaxxers.

Lootman wrote: I cannot help but feel that this is all getting a bit out of hand. Surely the point of being fully vaccinated is to not need so much testing for every little thing?

The point of being fully vaccinated is to reduce the impact of Covid.

Exactly how it does that is not the point, it could reduce the number of infections, the severity of the infections, the number of deaths, the number of non-pharmalogical counter measures, etc. If vaccine makes some worse and others better then it's complex, if the vaccine improves things so different trade offs are made it's still good. People who focus on single measure are being disingenuous.

BigB wrote:That might be the theory, and it might be true for guided lateral flow tests and the schools' LFTs, but in many cases they are just handed out freely by the box by local authorities. The serial numbers recorded are just batches, not individual unique ids for each test.

They may not be traceable, but the instructions in the box say that you "must" report the results, positive or negative, to the NHS.

However I'd hazard a guess that hardly any negative results are reported, and not all the positive ones either.

Scott.

zico wrote:

Lootman wrote: If you are not vaccinated then you still need the negative test result. Seems reasonable to me.

If you're not vaccinated, you shouldn't be near other people, except for like-minded anti-vaxxers.

More than 7,700 new cases of the virus have been detected during the most recent wave starting in May, but just 72 of the confirmed cases were reported in people who were known to have been infected previously – that is, less than 1% of the new cases.

Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News ... spx/309762