UK citizens are once again able to order Covid-19 lateral flow tests from the government after supplies ran out yesterday and this morning.
The National Health Service ran out of home testing kits as a result of exceptional demand following prime minister Boris Johnson’s address to the nation on Sunday evening in which he warned of a “tidal wave” of coronavirus infections as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 spreads in the UK.
People who logged on to the government’s website, gov.uk were advised to try again later or book a test site appointment instead.
Kits may not have been available online but they were available at local pharmacies, some community sites and some schools and colleges.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) had its busiest day ever on Monday, with 1.6mln Covid-19 tests taken and 230,000 boxes of home testing kits dispatched in England.
Demand for lateral flow test kits, as the Christmas party season would normally move into full swing, has gone through the roof. There have also been reports of people being unable to book slots for PCR tests – regarded as more reliable than lateral flow tests.
The current advice from the government is for those who have been double jabbed to take a lateral flow test daily for one week if they come into contact with someone with Covid-19; if the test is negative, they have no need to self-isolate.
“What we know is that overall it will detect about 50% of cases compared to PCR, but it will detect about 80% or even more than that of people who have high amounts of virus and therefore are at the highest risk of transmitting to others,” said Dr Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser at the UKHSA.
Put another way, the higher the viral load in a person’s system, the more likely that person is to infect others in their vicinity but the more likely it is that a lateral flow test will return an accurate result.
A windfall for private equity-backed US firm
US firm Innova Medical claims to produce the most used antigen tests in the world and to have delivered more than 500mln SARS-CoV-2 rapid antigen test kits to its customers worldwide.
In the UK Porton Down study, the Innova antigen test had a sensitivity of 97.0% in detecting infectious patients when testing 323 Covid-19 positive patients, regardless of symptoms.
The Innova antigen test has a specificity of 99.9% to 99.97% from over 1.7 million tests, the company claims on its website.
The UK has spent more than £1bn on lateral flow tests but it has not necessarily been the goldmine you might expect for UK companies.
Omega Diagnostics Group PLC (AIM:ODX) and Global Access Diagnostics were early members of the UK Rapid Antigen Test Consortium, while Derby-based SureScreen Diagnostics was the first UK government to supply Covid-19 tests to the government.
Of those UK companies mentioned, Omega is the only quoted company and predictably it saw its share price spike in March of last year when Covid-19 first started dominating the headlines. Its shares rose from 7.41p in mid-March to 107p by early October of last year but since then the shares have slumped to 26.25p.
On 25 November, the company said it was disappointed in the lack of progress in talks with the UK's Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) about what coronavirus (Covid-19) tests are needed.
The test kit company, which quickly adapted its technology to provide Covid-19 lateral flow tests during the pandemic, said its revenues from these kits in the six months to the end of September were up 136% to £1.29mln.
This contributed to total group revenue increasing 81% to £5.73mln, while group losses before tax surged to £2.75mln from £0.28mln a year ago.
The company said it has “not yet had confirmation from the DHSC regarding which test they require us to manufacture”, while talks with other companies introduced by the DHSC “have not resulted in a commercial agreement to manufacture tests that will be procured by the UK Government”.
Meanwhile, the Guardian newspaper reported as long ago as January of this year that the UK government had bought more than 380mln test kits from Innova.
The government signed two deals with the US company, one worth £107mln and another worth £496mln.
Nice work if you can get it.