Paying For A Boots Covid Test Is Morally Indefensible
One of the peculiar quirks of the Covid era is our newfound preoccupation with the ins and outs of testing.
Right at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were seeing the first trickle of cases on our hospital wards, all we knew about the SARS-CoV-2 testing was that it wasn’t very good.
As many as a third of infected cases were producing false negatives, which may have been, in part, due to the unfamiliarity we had with even using the swabs – how far should they go in? Nose or mouth first? What bottle does it go in?
Flash forward six months and everyone is now an expert, or so it seems. And our fractured testing system has only got more complicated, after Boots announced it would offer a new rapid test that can give you a Covid result in just 12-minutes. The catch? It’ll cost you £120.
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Testing in the UK has been a contentious subject since the start of the pandemic, riddled with endless controversies, including the abject failure of the outsourced test and trace system.
The government offers four pillars of Covid testing: 1 & 2 are nose and throat swabs, which look for specific sequences of genetic material in the lab, detecting current infection, called RT-PCR. Pillar 1 is for hospital patients and Pillar 2 the outsourced community testing programme. Pillar 3 is antibody tests, looking for recent or past infection. Lastly, Pillar 4 is surveillance, and is a combination of the above.
But the Boots test, known as the LumiraDx, is a different type altogether, called an antigen test to detect current infection. So is this pricey, private test a good addition to the testing arsenal?
In short, no.
Firstly, all tests have limitations – producing both false negatives and false positive results. Even for the gold standard, false negatives still occur between one in three and...
