Helen MacDonald

We've talked about it before.

I think there's still huge interest in diagnostic tests, both concerns from clinicians about the poor availability of PCR testing and

and speculation and hope building around the emerging idea of COVID passports that might help you get back to work, antibody testing, and still this need to understand population estimates of how many people have been infected

And a couple of papers recently, since we last talked a bit about this, have caught my eye.

One was an article in Annals of Internal Medicine giving an overview of diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2.

And the thing that really appealed to me about this paper is they had a nice little summary grid in there.

And across the top, they highlight four cases for testing.

Asymptomatic people, so sort of, I feel fine, but have I got it?

Symptomatic people, I feel ill and have I got it?

So sort of scenarios where you might want to rule in or rule out active disease.

So convalescence, are you still infectious?

And large population, how many people have had it?

I think there's another scenario which is increasingly of interest to people in countries like ours where we haven't had much PCR testing, which is, have I had it in the past and can I go back to work now or see somebody who's vulnerable?

And down the other side of this grid, they've got the different types of testing.

So PCR, point of care, antibody tests.

So for in each scenario, you can then go to the cell and find out for that type of test, for that type of clinical situation, what do we know at the moment?

And I think the overarching message from that table to me seems to be that aside from testing of symptomatic people with PCR, we're pretty uncertain about most things.

Then, almost as we were on air last week, a second interesting paper caught my eye on a preprint server.

It was also a paper from Oxford looking at nine antibody tests and comparing their performance.

And I'd seen less around, particularly sort of aggregated data on lots of different antibody tests, and it made me quite excited to see