Alert on pharmacy tests for Covid

All tests have limitations - producing false negative and false positive results. Even for the gold standard, false negatives still occur between one in three and one in 50 positive cases, which means that an infected person would be walking around thinking they are free of the disease.

The government offers four pillars for the Covid test: 1 and 2 are nose and throat swabs, which look for specific sequences of genetic material in the laboratory, detecting the current infection, called RT-PCR. Pillar 1 is for hospital patients and Pillar 2 is the third party community testing programme. Pillar 3 are the antibody tests, looking for recent or past infection. Finally, Pillar 4 is surveillance and is a combination of the above.