This government seems to have more "leaks" than Boris Johnson's condoms.
Revealed: NHS staff given flawed coronavirus tests
Leaked memo exposes farce as Covid-19 results are less reliable than first thought because of 'degraded' performance
Coronavirus tests given to thousands of NHS staff so they could return to work have been found to be flawed and should no longer be relied on, a leaked document reveals.
The memo from Public Health England (PHE), sent earlier this month, warns of "
degraded" performance, meaning the results are less reliable than first thought.
Almost 100,000 NHS and social care workers and their relatives have now undergone tests in an effort to get as many staff back to the frontline as possible.
But the memo, dated April 11, reveals that "
discordant results" have been identified in the tests, run by PHE and NHS laboratories, requiring ambiguous samples to be re-checked.
It raises the prospect that thousands of NHS nurses and doctors who were told they were free of coronavirus may have been sent back to work while they were contagious. In other cases, those found to be positive may assume they have developed antibodies to the virus when in fact they have never had it.
It came as Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, said it was "
terrific" that the health service now has the capacity to carry out 39,000 tests a day, even though less than half of those tests were used on Tuesday.
All PHE's 12 centres have been told to stop using the existing tests by Thursday, [and begin] using checks supplied by commercial firms. NHS laboratories still using the method have been told any uncertain results must be double-checked until all have switched to only using such kits.
The PHE memo, seen by The Telegraph, warns of "
quality assurance difficulties" in the programme, saying shortages of swabs and transport led to local variations in the way the national scheme has been run.
It says enzyme performance in the tests had degraded since the results were originally validated.
Health officials at PHE said on Tuesday that an issue was found in two labs towards the end of last month. They said staff had been given advice about how to "mitigate" the problems, with changes made to replace a component whose quality had deteriorated since the testing began.
An audit of 1,144 samples in one lab found 35 discrepant samples – a rate of around three per cent – compared with other firms, PHE said. Officials said after some changes were made this was brought down to less than two per cent.
Officials insisted the differences did not mean the tests were worse than commercial tests, as either test could be incorrect.
PHE had previously boasted that it was one of the first in the world to develop a highly sensitive test to detect the virus and roll it out across the country. Health officials said the programme was always intended to move to commercial kits as soon as they were available but set up the tests to ensure they could be made available more quickly.
SOURCE
And if that hadn't been leaked? Do we think that those who are now possibly at risk would have been told about the cock-up? No, I don't either.
