Angus Colwell Angus Colwell

Are free lateral flow tests about to be scrapped?

(Photo: Getty)

Could free lateral flow tests be on the way out? The Sunday Times says said so on its front page but Nadhim Zahawi has denied it outright. It’s clear there’s a split in government over this.

Officials quoted in the Sunday Times article say the country needs to realise Covid is here to stay, and to accept that vaccines have blunted most of its force. David Spiegelhalter, one of the most respected statisticians who has been commenting on the pandemic, has said Britain is ‘certainly not going to see a big rise in intensive care admissions and deaths’. Given that deaths are running at 150 a day (and Sage forecast suggested a range of ‘600 to 6,000 deaths a day’) that raises the prospect of the actual death numbers coming nowhere near the range Sage was giving just three weeks ago. In London, the Omicron epicentre, intensive care bed usage has been falling towards normal levels — far behind what was seen this time last year.

  

The mooted plan on tests is that they would still be rolled out in schools, care homes and hospitals, as well as to people with symptoms. But it would end people habitually testing themselves when they feel well, as well as rescinding advice that everyone should test themselves twice a week. When the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock made lateral flows available for free last April, he said that the tests would be ‘fundamental in helping us quickly spot positive cases and squash any outbreaks’. But that was then, when Covid was a virus that the government thought it could suppress. Now, with the rise of the more transmissible Omicron variant, as well as 95 per cent of adults having antibodies, more are explicitly accepting that Covid is not going away.

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