Ahead of schools reopening to all pupils in England on 8 March, the RSS Covid-19 Task Force issued a statement regarding their concerns about the use of lateral flow testing for secondary school pupils.
England's current policy for secondary schools is that returning pupils should be offered in or near the school premises, three lateral flow tests taken three to five days apart. After these two weeks, pupils are asked to self-test twice weekly.
The task force warns of the risk of inaccurate test results. While concerns have been raised about the issues of false negatives with lateral flow tests, there is also the risk that while infection-prevalence is low, that most ‘positive’ tests could be false.
The group of senior RSS fellows highlighted the need for more transparency, recommending that detailed data on compliance with the testing and results from it should be made public. The group also raised the possibilities of the intelligence that could be gained from experimentation within the roll-out.
The statement recommends that during the second week of testing, pupils could be randomised so that one-third of pupils would be offered a PCR test as their first test in week two rather than a lateral flow test so that further evidence can be gathered on how the performance of the two different tests compare.
The group's concerns were picked up by numerous media outlets, including the BBC, Radio 4's Today, Observer and Telegraph.
Read the statement in full (PDF)
Read our letter to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) (PDF) sent on 12 March 2021.