Jon DeeksProfessor of Biostatistics, University of Birmingham

UK has a "LEAKY TESTING"' system for COVID 19 | Professor Jon Deeks Explains |

10 Jul 2020 · 1 min

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Professor Jon Deeks warns that the UK's COVID-19 testing relies on single swabs, which miss infected people and let them spread the virus. New Zealand uses up to three swabs per person to catch more cases. The UK system is leaky.

And can you, can you say whether you think the UK's approach to testing in this phase, how it compares to other countries as they have eased the lockdown?
One concern which we've seen expressed is this risk of false negatives with the swabs in the contact tracing, that other countries do multiple swabs on somebody who initially tests negative. So I think New Zealand tests them 3 times. We talked— started talking about the risk that actually you're going to miss the disease, so we are— we've got a leaky testing problem in that contact tracing thing at the moment, that we are allowing the risk of missing disease.