John Deeks

We're seeing large numbers of studies being published.

So each week, we're updating our review searches.

And last week, we had 3,500 new studies on COVID we had to screen to look for diagnostic test studies.

And we found, I think, 16 new studies of serology tests in a week.

So the literature is changing very fast.

The original studies we saw tend to be opportunistic studies, mainly from China, from the Wuhan area, which have

So it's good to see that data, but it's a little unclear as what its meaning is.

And it's not the sort of study designs you'll be very used to looking at a lot of the time.

That's absolutely true and there's an organization called Find in Geneva who have got the best list of tests that we know of and as of today it's got 296 different serology tests listed on it which is far more than the number of papers we've seen so

trying to map out what tests are being used, what tests exist, whether the tests actually are coming from the same manufacturer, but are just being sold with different names in different countries.

We wish we had Sherlock Holmes working for us, to be honest.

It's a real mystery as to how this is being done.

The regulation of tests is very different from the regulation of drugs.

For obtaining market approval for the European Union, you have to have a CE mark.

And to get a CE mark for a COVID biomarker test, you do that by a process of notification rather than any assessment.

You have to lodge a request for a CE mark through an organization in the EU and you almost automatically get the CE mark.

So you can't think that these tests have gone through scrutiny.

They're not allowed to market with claims that they do something they don't do, but there's nobody who checks that.

And indeed, there have been certain tests which have been found to be totally fraudulent, which have been marketed.

But there's also no central list of tests which have been awarded CE marks that we can't find one list.