Thread by @karamballes

1/🧵"This is crazy, how is this ethical?"

Pilots for Daily Testing to replace isolation are starting.

Finally got a copy of the operational handbook and official FAQs

Government isn't following the science

2/ Basics: Close contacts take a LFD at the start of school for 7 days to avoid isolation.
All the experts I know say these tests aren't reliable enough for this purpose.

Book says LFDs will catch the majority of cases, this is a bit of an assumption, but it will miss cases

3/ Close contacts doing DCT can only go to school, they must isolate when not in school. This is because they know this does carry a risk. So why are they doing this, seems like the DfE are balancing risk of higher transmission with reducing isolation.They'e trying to be clever🤦‍♂️

5/ Justifications. General gist is more people will engage with this who wouldn't have bothered isolating.

Oh and it allows parents to work, economy over health mentally writt large

4/Says the benefit is more positive cases could be found, however this could be done with testing at home. And finding more positive cases who are mixing with others when they would have been isolating does seem helpful to me

6/ Again it says this won't detect all cases, but because it will find more cases its worth it.
Not of they are in school when they should have been isolating, isolating and again this argument is happening

7/ They come into school for the morning test, might improve test reliability due to supervision. However a positive test means they mixed on the way to school, what about getting home?

Try to get on a quiet bus, that's their actually solution!

8/Another issue is that they only take the test for 7 days, incubation rate can be longer tha 7 days particularly looking at some of the B117 studies

9/ Accepts these tests aren't good enough for international travel

10/ Consent, This is totally shocking.
Only the close contact who chooses not to isolate has to give consent.
Everyone else who has to share that space, their consent isn't asked, imagine if they're from a CV household.

11/ DfE is saying they are going to run a live experiment in schools with a highly infectious disease which they acknowledge may increase risk of transmission, and the vast majority of guinea pigs aren't even asked going to be asked if they consent.

Absolutely shocking

Also some of the language in the handbook makes reference to if parents have the chance to do DCT in their workplace, so it seems that they hope to roll this out more widely.

After using the pilot schools as guinea pigs. Would love to see the modelling they did on this
FOI time?