The Lancet ( nothing more to say really)

The government was listening to the advice available, harris.

Responses, I should say. It's the patients who do the requesting.

I know I’m being a bit naive here but we were always told as youngsters off our mum ‘ prevention is better than cure’ wish the government had listened to this and did early testing.

Blimmin' 'eck, even GP surgeries want forty-eight hours to get repeat prescription requests out. Now imagine that on a national scale.

swab test and results are available withing 12 hours

Do you mean are available or can be available provided there are enough open labs to send them to and enough lab technicians working round the clock? And enough medical test drivers dashing around the country picking them up and so on and so forth.

The CMO and CSO will be feeding this WHO advise to the government.

They haven’t taken WHO advice on testing because they were unable to do so because of complete lack of foresight.

CMO and CSA were not going to put their scientific reputations on the line by not giving the best available advice.

They were not taking WHO advice

No. Because they were taking advice from British Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Scientific Advisor.

Baggs its a swab test and results are available withing 12 hours

Gove insisted that he took no part in the exercise in 2016. As chancellor he would have been very much involved.

I think they must have all been on a course entitled

“ How to bare face lie”

One bit of good news is that the virus so far seems pretty stable and only two strains have so far been identified so a vaccine will be easier to produce.

One hopes this remains the same if the world doesn’t help to control it properly in the continent if Africa.

Well as Baggs said ‘if’.
Some say we do have capacity some say not. Who knows??‍♀️
I don’t.
I think every Government is going to get a lots of criticism when it’s all over.
I will try my best not to bring the virus back and will obey all the restrictions. I hope everyone will.
Must go, got a plane to catch. Keep healthy everyone.

The mixed messages coming out of the government were appalling. Do as I say, not as I do, from Johnson.

Same is happening in US. Shameful. The testing should have been organized and begun in earnest over a month ago. Every country that did so saw the steep slope of the infection rate begin to flatten. Johnson and Trump, however, chose to downplay the urgency and compare COVID-19 to the "flu" and say it's no big deal, etc. During the intervening weeks, asymptomatic individuals began passing the virus on at an exponential rate. Makes me so angry.

Many medical and scientific experts were saying similar to this Lancet article some weeks ago and were puzzled by the way the government was handling this. They were not taking WHO advice. This is compounded by the run down state of our NHS. I expect there to be a major enquiry when this is over, and I hope we will have a very different, more equal, kinder and less money orientated society.

I read an article yesterday about how the Irish government are dealing with the urgent need for PPE for frontline staff. The health minister announce they normally spend 15 million euros a year on PPE. They now will spend 225 million by importing huge consignments on a daily basis from China. Aer Lingus are providing daily flights to transport it. The first flight arrives back in Dublin today with €20 million of PPE. There are another 10 flights scheduled before April 1st. That’s a nation doing their utmost to protect frontline staff!

Quite clearly I'm no scientist and at the risk of sounding like something from the Sun, if certain prominent figures can be tested, who decides and why can't it be rolled out for others?

The U.K. government has been extremely bad at rolling out testing.

It wasted the whole of February. It was aware of the danger and totally abrogated its responsibility to keep the population safe.

These sort of scenarios are always exercised by governments and in 2016 this very thing was looked at by this government and they were made absolutely aware then that things like ventilators, testing was totally insufficient.

It is the scandal of the decade

More. There are plenty of tests available to the U.K. government

“In any outbreak situation, a triad of diagnostic tests are needed:

A highly sensitive (chance of test detecting those with the disease) and specific (chance of test detecting those without the disease) molecular test to detect the virus to confirm clinically suspected cases, and guide public health measures, such as isolation or quarantine. Such tests have to be performed in a laboratory by trained laboratory staff using specialised equipment. It typically takes more than an hour before the results are available.

A rapid simple-to-use test to triage suspected cases at the point-of-care, or in community settings. These tests for detecting viral proteins can be performed by anyone who can follow simple instructions, and the results can be ready in 10-15 minutes.

A (serological) test that can be used to detect current and past exposure, to assess the true extent of an outbreak, and inform prevention and control strategies. These can be done in batches in a laboratory or individually in community settings.”

Information from the course I am doing run by London School of Medicine and Tropical Hygene

“Since the sequence of the novel coronavirus (SARS CoV-2) causing COVID-19 was published on January 12 2020, more than 20 different molecular tests have become available to detect genetic material of the virus (ribo-nucleic acid / RNA). As the symptoms of COVID-19 are relatively common in many infections (e.g. fever, cough), tests to detect the virus are useful in confirming patients who fulfil the clinical and epidemiologic case definition for COVID-19. This enables public health measures such as isolation or quarantine to be introduced”

I've just remembered throat and nose swab tests. But I doubt these are quick, simple, results on the spot tests.

Baggs says it all.

My teenage granddaughter is shut away in her bedroom with possible corona virus. The others in the house had not shown symptoms when I last spoke them. When she emerges early next week they will not know whether she really did have the virus or not. I suppose if her family start getting symptoms it might be the virus. Without tests how can you tell?

M0nica, I read this the other day, and it certainly gave me food for thought

novaramedia.com/2020/03/23/when-logistics-run-out-of-time/

And Summerlove, wouldn’t continuing to shop everyday have infected more people than one trip to buy for a week?

Summerlove I agree. Fortunately they are now out of seclusion and no-one developed the disease.

They have also now set up home delivery orders with several local stores and got themselves organised and are following the rules meticulously.