Asked by: Peter Bone (Independent - Wellingborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the proportion of covid-19 tests that are false negative.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
In June 2020 the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies published a briefing paper on the impact of false positives and false negatives in the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing programme, which is available at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020
The briefing paper states that the UK operational false positive rate is unknown.
Asked by: Peter Bone (Independent - Wellingborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the proportion of covid-19 test results that are false positive.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
In June 2020 the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies published a briefing paper on the impact of false positives and false negatives in the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing programme, which is available at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gos-impact-of-false-positives-and-negatives-3-june-2020
The briefing paper states that the UK operational false positive rate is unknown.
Asked by: Peter Bone (Independent - Wellingborough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of body bags available for use by (a) the NHS and (b) funeral directors.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Government published ‘Coronavirus (COVID-19): personal protective equipment (PPE) plan’ on 10 April. It incorporates guidance on who needs PPE and when they need it, routes to ensure those who need it can get it at the right time and sets out actions to secure enough PPE to last through the crisis. PPE includes aprons, eye protectors, face masks, gloves, gowns, hand hygiene, clinical waste bags and body bags.
In addition to making PPE available to National Health Service trusts, primary care and adult social care, we are also delivering PPE to all Local Resilience Forums (LRFs). These multi-agency LRF partnerships are made up of representatives from local public services, including the emergency services, local authorities, the NHS, the Environment Agency and others. This enables LRFs to respond to urgent local spikes in need across the adult social care system and other front-line services, including mortuary and funeral services where providers are unable to access PPE through their usual routes.