An exclusive club of around 10,000 people have been selected at random to try out a brand new NHS-backed coronavirus antibody testing kit at home, aimed at working out how many have been infected since the outbreak began.

My 22-year-old brother, Tom Longstaff, was one of the members of the public asked to take part in the first Government funded trial of its kind, and here’s what we found out.

The major COVID-19 home testing programme was commissioned by the Department for Health and Social Care in April, and is being led by a world-class team of scientists at Imperial College London, alongside the NHS and researchers at Ipsos MORI.

The trial, called REACT-2, involves up to 10,000 NHS registered patients being sent an at-home finger prick testing kit, designed to increase understanding of how many people may have developed some level of immunity to coronavirus having had it in the past.

Visit our live blog for the latest updates: Coronavirus news live

Coronavirus antibody tests are not currently offered on-demand by the NHS and there is no way to volunteer to take part in trial programmes, so when machine operative, Tom, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, was asked to help scientists beat the virus, it came as an exciting surprise. The NHS has said participants have been carefully selected from 312 NHS Trusts to reflect the general UK population

Tom, who is fit and healthy with no underlying health problems, was sent the testing kit in the post yesterday after agreeing to take part. The kit comes with an instructions manual and an information sheet about the REACT-2 programme.

The kit itself includes a testing stick, finger prick tool for drawing blood, cleaning equipment and a buffer liquid needed to make the test work. Tom said he found the test easy to perform on his own and from start to finish, only had to wait 30 minutes before getting his result.

The antibody test is broken down into just a handful of simple steps, starting with using a yellow tool to draw blood from the inside of your finger and depositing a droplet of blood onto an allocated slot on the testing stick.

Tom then added two drops of buffer liquid to a different slot and had to wait between 10 and 15 minutes for the test to get to work and deliver the result.

It can provide one of four possible results, an invalid result, a negative result, an IgG positive result and an IgM positive result. A negative result means the test found no antibodies or trace of past infection and an IgG positive result means the individual has probably had COVID-19 in the past and has antibodies.

The test, however, is not reliable for IgM positive results according to the NHS.

Although he has had no noticeable coronavirus symptoms, Tom said he wanted to receive a positive result and the knowledge that his immune system has developed virus-defeating antibodies having had COVID-19 in the past.

Tom’s result came out as negative and he was asked to submit photographic evidence of his results and complete an in-depth participant questionnaire. His results, along with everyone else’s, will be used to assess how the extent of the spread of the virus across England.

Why is the NHS antibody test important and what does it mean?

The Government has said understanding how many people have had coronavirus is ‘vital’ for the future implementation or relaxation of control measures such as social distancing. But before any home antibody tests can be rolled out nationally, researchers need to understand how easy these tests are to perform at home, and how reliable they are.

The test requires participants to place a finger prick of blood onto a testing stick, adding a reactive dye and reading off either a positive or negative result. If positive, the individual has raised levels of antibodies to the coronavirus in their blood.

But whilst the test is accurate at identifying if a participant has already been infected with the virus, and now has antibodies, the NHS stresses it is unsure if having antibodies will protect individuals against future infection.

The results from the antibody tests will be compared to the ‘gold-standard’ lab-based blood sample tests and, if the at-home test is found to have a high degree of accuracy, the programme rolled out to 100,000 people later this year.

REACT-2 is due for completion by the end of the summer and the overall results and findings will be published at a later date.

The REACT-2 programme is ongoing amidst concerns raised yesterday by experts that antibody tests for NHS and care staff are being rolled out without ‘adequate assessment’. The British Medical Journal warns that a positive result offers ‘no benefit’ to hospitals and care staff because it cannot identify immunity.

It also comes as last month, the Government’s own Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) ordered providers of fingerprick testing facilities to stop providing services to retailers such as Superdrug, who were using labs to process at-home testing kits sold in store. On May 28 Superdrug pulled the kits off the shelves over accuracy fears.

Visit our dedicated coronavirus news section for the latest updates by clicking here.

Source: Read Full Article