Wuhan Coronavirus

Debate between Lord Bethell and Lord Borwick

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell]

The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has put it very well. Testing is absolutely critical to the correct treatment of this virus. There is a race on to find cheap, easily applied and speedy testing arrangements. That will help us avoid the kinds of complex arrangements that Nick Robinson vividly described. The NHS is proceeding incredibly energetically. Financial arrangements are not holding back any of the work that is being done, and resources are being thrown at that in a very big way.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend has spoken a lot about the tests. Can he give us an estimate of their accuracy? Is there a large number of false negatives or false positives in the test results?

[Lord Bethell]

My noble friend asks a very reasonable question. It raises the issue of heat tests at airports—which I know that he did not ask about—which is a subject of concern. Certainly, temperature tests provide a large number of false positives, and that is why they have not been applied at British airports. However, the saliva tests being used in clinical conditions at the moment are thought to be very reliable indeed, and the number of false positives is very low.