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U.K. Says 3.5 Million Tests For Virus Exposure Will Be Available Within Days

U.K. Says 3.5 Million Tests That Show Virus Exposure Will Be Available Within Days

(Bloomberg) --

The U.K. has ordered 3.5 million home-testing kits that show whether someone has been exposed to the coronavirus, and they’ll be available within days, a health official said.

The tests will be distributed when scientists from Oxford University finish evaluating them for public use, according to Sharon Peacock, director of the U.K.’s National Infection Service.

The blood tests, which check for antibodies against the virus behind the pandemic, will be sold via Amazon.com Inc. and pharmacy chains so people can test themselves, Peacock told a panel of lawmakers in parliament. The U.K. ordered “further millions” of these tests Wednesday, Peacock said. The effort is part of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s push to scale up monitoring of the disease after his government faced criticism for not carrying out enough testing.

If shown to be accurate, the test can help researchers evaluate what proportion of people get the virus without any symptoms, Chris Whitty, the U.K.’s chief medical adviser said in a press conference at Downing Street, and “that has big implications for the way we then manage this.”

So-called antibody tests could turbo charge the testing process, giving people who’ve been unable to confirm whether they’ve been infected or haven’t experienced symptoms a cheap and easy way to find out whether they’ve been exposed. That would enable countries to better understand how widely the disease has spread, informing policy decisions about whom to quarantine and when certain economic or social activities can be resumed.

U.K. Says 3.5 Million Tests For Virus Exposure Will Be Available Within Days

“The first thing we need to do is collect the information to understand this epidemic,” said Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, said in the press conference. “We need to answer the critical questions and need to make sure the right people get the test first in order to allow workers to go back.”

The approach is less reliable than the molecular diagnostic tests that are used to determine whether someone is currently infected. Those tests, which have confirmed the more than 440,000 cases known globally, look for nucleic acids of the virus in people’s samples. Scientists have spent recent weeks comparing the reliability of the antibody tests with the molecular assays.

Antibody tests sometimes incorrectly give a negative result in a person who has the virus, since people only develop antibodies against the coronavirus several days after being exposed. And they can wrongly give a positive result, too, if someone has developed these antibodies while fighting a different coronavirus. Even so, the tests could provide an easy way to see who appears to have developed some resistance to the virus, potentially letting them back into hospital work.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.