Many Children With Colds Are Being Told To Stay Home, But Is This Right?

Scientists have suggested that thousands of children with the sniffles may wrongly be being told to stay at home over concerns they have COVID.

Secondary school children are asked to take two lateral flow tests per week. If they test positive, they must stay at home until they receive a result from a gold standard PCR swab.

Latest Test and Trace (T&T) statistics reveal 18,930 of the 615,000 rapid swabs taken by pupils in the week ending September 29 came back positive.

Of those, 13 per cent, or 2,053 were either negative or voided when followed up with a PCR.

The proportion of children being incorrectly told they have COVID by the devices has doubled in a month.

It’s prompted health chiefs to start a probe, with the scientific community now debating whether the rise is actually down to the resurgence of colds.

Experts have suggested the heavy mucus samples from children who test positive may be skewing the accuracy of the swabs.

Gaming tests to get time off school and faulty LFDs have also been suggested as likely factors behind the rise, and the latest Test and Trace data revealed there were 614.407 lateral flow swabs carried out by secondary school pupils in the last week of September, the most up to date data available.

Approximately 13 per cent of the positive results were incorrect (2,053 came back negative or void out of 15,916 positives that were followed up with PCRs).

For example, the figure stood at 8 per cent the week before (1,112 out of 13,709).

In the first week of September, six per cent of school children (213 out of 3,314) received false positives.

Dr Susan Hopkins, the chief medical adviser of the UK Health Security Agency said that they’ve been made conscious of some areas reporting positive (lateral flow) test results with subsequent negative PCR tests and that they were looking into the matter.

There have been numerous anecdotal reports of children testing positive with LFDs, but then getting a negative result from PCRs.

Dr Kit Yates, a mathematician at the University of Bath and member of Independent SAGE, tweeted that officials were saying the false positives were likely down to colds and heavy mucus samples.

He said PHE, a now-defunct body replaced by the UKHSA advising schools that lateral flow test positives followed by PCR negatives are likely because of colds and heavy mucus samples.

But the sad fact is that because of all of this, babies are now having issues with reading faces as it’s been over a year of people wearing face masks, while we watch couples making cooing sounds at their baby, with both parents wearing masks.

Wearing a face mask is no longer mandated, so why bother? It’s not like MPs are still wearing them, and neither PCR nor lateral flow tests have a high rate of accuracy, yet we still appear to be using them.

We should be getting back to normal now, and it seems that we’re doing more harm than good doing these tests, especially children, with no symptoms, and it’s become insane because it’s all about keeping fear going.

The thing is you can enter the serial number into the app and claim a positive without even taking the test, you can also claim a negative in the same way, and now people are saying that some drinks that we drink can get a positive test.

So, if you’re feeling a little unwell, you take a lateral flow test which comes out negative and then you go ahead and take the PVR test which comes out positive, but then out of curiosity take another PCR test a couple of days later which is then negative, which has happened.