There is much furore over Ag-LFDs again this week, with the arguments often over-simplified, & even turning toxic.

It doesn't help that the government have, & are continuing to, lie their way through the pandemic.

But that doesn't mean Ag-LFDs are all bad...

A thread 👇

1/

MHRA yesterday ruled that Ag-LFDs should not be used in schools to regularly test contacts of cases to reduce time spent in isolation.
This is a risky approach, & there is no data of the effectiveness (or cost-effectiveness), so this a fair decision.

This ruling, while probably correct & fair, will likely further damage public trust in testing, particularly as the debate rages on with government saying one thing and the MHRA another.

So, I thought it time for me to cut through the noise & ask - What does the data show?

3/

Much of the discourse over the past few months has been obsessing over the ‘poor’ performance of Ag-LFDs.

The principal argument has been that the Liverpool testing pilot showed they only find 40% of infections. But does this figure actually show us anything meaningful? 

4/

The Liverpool community testing pilot evaluated asymptomatic testing using Ag-LFDs. They ran a sub-sample of tests of 5689 individuals, from 48 different testing sites, which were swabbed (supervised self-swab) for Ag-LFD and PCR side by side. 

https://t.co/W8Rksg3dql

5/