Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 25 June 2020 to Question 53610 on Coronavirus: Screening, if he will publish the evidence that his Department reviewed on the effectiveness of self-swabbing covid-19 testing.
International peer reviewed evidence, and real-world assessments from the Department’s testing programme has shown that swab tests taken by non-clinically trained individuals are just as effective as those taken by clinicians. A notable example would be ‘Self-sampling for community respiratory illness: a new tool for national virological surveillance’ by Elliot et al (2015).