Scotland and Wales to buy 12-minute Covid testing machines

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Northerner

Northerner

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The Scottish and Welsh governments are buying hundreds of new high-speed Covid-19 testing machines that produce results in 12 minutes and are designed for use in remote areas and by mobile clinics.

The Scottish government has announced it is buying 300 of the machines, which were given emergency, fast-track authorisation by the US government’s federal drugs administration last week.

Ivan McKee, the Scottish minister for trade, investment and innovation, said the highly portable machines were designed for small clinics and mobile testing units dispatched to rural areas and the islands. He expected them to be introduced nationwide by the end of this year.

Test results were uploaded to a cloud-based internet database, he said, allowing details to be shared immediately with health officials involved in tracking cases in sudden outbreaks and new clusters.

Presumably England will buy some in November then, after insisting they won't 🙄
 
Cochrane review of rapid test studies just published: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD013705/full

Studies provided little information about their participants, so it is not possible to tell if the results can be applied to people with no symptoms, mild symptoms, or who were hospitalised with COVID‐19. Accurate rapid tests would have the potential to select people for RT‐PCR testing or to be used where RT‐PCR is not available. However, the evidence currently is not strong enough and more studies are urgently needed to be able to say if these tests are good enough to be used in practice.

However, the review only included studies published up to 25th May. No doubt there have been a bunch more published since then, and the review will be updated "soon".
 
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