Coronavirus: Hopes rise for home finger-prick test

A home finger-prick test for the coronavirus will be offered to millions of people and delivered by Amazon if checks in Britain this week show it works.

Nurse pricking a patient's finger. Please view all pictures from this series along with other medical shots in my portfolio.

A home finger-prick test for the coronavirus will be offered to millions of people and delivered by Amazon if checks this week show that it works.

Those who have been tested could be allowed back to work if they have recovered and the tests show that they are immune.

If evaluation reveals that the test is accurate, staff at Britain’s National Health Service would be offered it in the next few weeks, with the general population gaining access online and in pharmacies.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has described tests that would show whether people had coronavirus as a “total game-changer”, enabling people to know once they were no longer at risk of catching or passing on the virus.

“We are massively ramping up our testing programs, buying in huge numbers of tests,” he said.

The British government has ordered 3.5 million testing kits from at least three commercial suppliers. Sharon Peacock, director of the national infection service at Public Health England, said validation of the kits was due to be completed this week.

The test looks for key markers of the immune response that the body mounts to fight off the virus. The kits can detect them in a droplet drawn from the fingertip.

“Several million tests have been purchased for use. We need to evaluate them in the laboratory, because these are brand new products, to be clear that they work as they are claimed to,” Professor Peacock told Britain’s science and technology select committee.

“Once they have been tested, and that will happen this week, and the bulk of the tests arrive, they will be distributed into the community in which there will be a mechanism to order a test via Amazon, performed at home and then sent back to see whether they’re positive or negative.”

Likening the technology to a pregnancy test, she said it would be simple for people to “read the lines” by eye to know if they had been infected, although another version of the test “might require you to go to somewhere like (the pharmacy chain) Boots” to have blood checked.

“If you have antibodies you know that you have the infection. It’s not just for key workers, it’s for the general population. Over time we’re expecting that a proportion of the population would be positive and that would allow them to get back to work,” she said.

“I would have thought there would be an absolutely minimal charge if there was a charge. Cost should not be a barrier to people having availability of these tests.”

Professor Whitty cautioned that the tests would not be available immediately. “I do not think that this is something we’ll suddenly be ordering on the internet next week.”

He said it would be a “dangerous mistake” to rush one into use if it risked wrongly telling people they were immune.

The Times