The most important thing to come out of today’s press conference was that Porton Down has been conducting ‘highly accurate’ community surveillance testing for some time albeit at small scale.

The initial results of this will announced ‘within the next few days’.

#covid19UK

My pet expert tells me that the Porton Down test is likely to be an ELISA Test. The gold standard of viral testing. 2/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELISA 

This is a very accurate test and not only indicates the presence of antibodies but the concentration of them too.

In many viral infections the concentration depends not only on the individual but also on whether you just had a glancing blow with the virus or a full meal deal. 3/

The test takes quite a long time to complete hence only 3500 tests per week.

However, on the assumption that they’ve been at it for a few weeks you’d hope that with careful selection of the test population, we may get an initial feel for the extent of community prevalence. 4/

It will also hopefully answer the question: Does a CV infection confer immunity?

But perhaps not: For how long? 5/

It would be great if we were one of the first to do this work. I’m sure there will be much international interest. /End