Is everyone doing LFT twice a week?

When I got my booster I asked the nurse about this.
It took her a few tries to actually understand that there are weeks on end when I go nowhere & see no-one other than the relative who lives with me (who also goes nowhere).
She then said that No, there is no need to do LFT unless I am having contact with others.

I do an LFT if im visiting people or attending an event. I report the results.

I’m testing and reporting regularly now. I have to in order to visit my elderly mother in her care home. I’ve been told the new lateral flows are better at picking up positive results than the original ones, I’ve no idea whether this is true or not.

Thank you for that info growstuff.

FarNorth

There are approx 66 million people in the UK.
Let's say that only 30 million test & report.
Of those, 1 million are positive.

Would it be sensible to say that 1/30 (approx 3%) of the population are known to be positive?
Or that 1/66 (approx 1.5%) of the population are known to be positive?

(completely fictitious figures, for illustration)

Actual reported positive cases are used alongside the results of the random sample.

FarNorth

I don't think anyone will be trying to collate results with names of people who ordered tests.
We've been encouraged and urged to get tests from local pharmacies, no names taken. So the supposed system is vague to start with.

Alegrias1 if scientists and/or statisticians draw any conclusions from the test results they get, without allowing for the fact - which they must know - that thousands or even millions of people are not reporting, then they are remarkably stupid.

The ONS is indeed not that stupid.

The positivity rates are produced using data from the COVID-19 Infection Survey, using a representative sample of households.

www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation#positivity-rates

The headline figure is only ever an estimate, but the ONS reckons it's 95% accurate.

There are approx 66 million people in the UK.
Let's say that only 30 million test & report.
Of those, 1 million are positive.

Would it be sensible to say that 1/30 (approx 3%) of the population are known to be positive?
Or that 1/66 (approx 1.5%) of the population are known to be positive?

(completely fictitious figures, for illustration)

We are only just getting them here so almost no one has had them except people working in hospitals with Covid patients. They are talking about it for school children. I suppose things will crank up soon.

No, I’ve only done a PCR test. It was negative.

WHO sets a standard of 7% positive on tests. It has since the start of testing worldwide. That’s why you can see a daily changing graph of the percentage of positive results. Not reporting negative results inflate the percentage of positives. This can’t be hard to understand.
I honestly don’t understand people who think the guidance doesn’t apply to them or who fail to read ALL the instructions!
I bet they are the same people who blame others for the high prevalence in the community, and travel restrictions being applied to their country by others.

I have reported my one result so far, which was negative.

I don't think anyone will be trying to collate results with names of people who ordered tests.

Maybe not, but they need to know if anyone starts ordering tests and not returning them. That's exactly why you have to have a code to order the tests in England. So they can trace you.

Alegrias1 if scientists and/or statisticians draw any conclusions from the test results they get, without allowing for the fact - which they must know - that thousands or even millions of people are not reporting, then they are remarkably stupid.

One might say the same about the people who don't think they need to report negative results even though every piece of accompanying literature tells them they have to. The metric is, how many of the tests being returned are positive. Its not rocket science.

I don't think anyone will be trying to collate results with names of people who ordered tests.
We've been encouraged and urged to get tests from local pharmacies, no names taken. So the supposed system is vague to start with.

Alegrias1 if scientists and/or statisticians draw any conclusions from the test results they get, without allowing for the fact - which they must know - that thousands or even millions of people are not reporting, then they are remarkably stupid.

FarNorth that only works if you’ve ordered the tests yourself though, surely? I usually order online but have recently been given a couple of boxes from elsewhere with no record of me having them so that would mess things up a bit.

Alegrias1

I'm a stickler rosie1959

I know lol

I'm a stickler rosie1959

Yes Alegrais I meant false negative or false positive I do not always put everything as eloquently as you

I’m wondering what you mean by “faulty” results Rosie1959. False negatives or false positives aren’t “faulty”, they are a consequence of testing - no test for anything is ever 100% correct, even PCR tests can give false negatives or false positives.

They want to know the proportion of negative results from all tests so that they can model the pandemic and its spread. That’s it.

I wondered why they wanted the results of LFT tests as surely its the PCR that is the totally correct result
Suppose they can see how many give faulty results

The teams collating the information can only work with what comes in. They can’t make a best guess and hope it’s correct.

Some people went a bit mad and have a store of the kits and
the powers that be don’t know who has them ( this has just changed) so they can only take account of the pos/neg results that we send in.
We discovered that one of our sisters wasn’t reporting hers last week on a family holiday.
She does now??

Not sure what you mean FarNorth, it is what it is. The percentage of tests that come back positive.

If thousands of people aren't sending back the results because they haven't understood, or bothered to read the instructions, or they otherwise think it's not important to report, then the system isn't working as it should.

Alegrias1 in that case, I think the results are being too narrowly interpreted.
There must be thousands of people not sending in results and possibly not even knowing that results should be reported.

Here's the link for reporting, in case anyone doesn't know.
In Scotland, it's different if you work in care or for the NHS or if you visit care homes. Possibly that's the case elsewhere too.

www.gov.uk/report-covid19-result

The flow flex ones seem much better

We do them if we hare going to visit someone or if we have been in contact with strangers for 15 minutes plus - on a train for example. We always report the results except for once when I forgot until it was too late . When I say we report the results, I mean I do as I am more conscientious than DH (of course!). I didn't set up an account, so have to put in our details every time, but it doesn't take long and at least I don't have a password to remember.