Due to the official period of mourning I'm not sure we will. The Taskforce report is already published and I've seen other statements that talk about 17 May as being the date that travel restrictions get lifted (as opposed to "may be lifted"). So I'm not sure there is much more to say at this point, the next stage being around 10 May when the traffic light countries get released. We may get some confirmation at some point as to whether LFD is good enough for pre-departure.

I did wonder as I read there are no politics until after the funeral. A simple statement to confirm 17th May would be good to inform the public and also LFDs too which might stop cancellations, in case you have any influence. Most people on trip advisor for example are waiting for some sort of confirmation about 17th May, we have you to ask but they don't.

It currently is, so I don't see why it wouldn't be. So I guess everyone travelling should take some of those NHS rapid tests with them! My main uncertainty is what happens after landing. I hope they just make rapid tests ok, because PCR is quite a cost (I know Shapps said they will work on tests being cheaper), but I will believe it when I see it.

Is the process of getting LFDs at pharmacies easy as just popping in and asking for a box or is any paperwork or ID needed?

They should just give you the box. They could ask you about how many are in your household, in order to give you potentially more kits.

https://maps.test-and-trace.nhs.uk/

(best to use this website during normal shopping hours)

I think the key benefit with PCR from a risk point of view is that the sample can be sequenced to review the strain of the virus that has been detected, and as the government seems to be very concerned to keep variants out of the country if at all possible this visibility is not something that would be achieved with LFDs. But quite how this would work if the PCRs are being processed privately and not by the NHS is another question.
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I also wonder how much sequencing adds to the cost of a PCR - the UK claims to be doing more of this than most other countries. Whilst I can't imagine it accounts for many tens or hundreds of pounds of extra cost we see on private PCR tests, it also can't be free...

PCR tests can definitely be made cheaper. At the current rate, the costs are going to put off millions of travelers. If the government subsidises PCR tests and drives the cost even lower, this will increase tax revenue due to more people working (more travel means more economic output, more people working etc) and the government will also save money in not having to pay furlough (more people back working means less people on furlough).

If the government actually wants to make travel easier for people and for the aviation and tourism industry to survive, then it can, and there are economic benefits to it.

Shapps was also saying that they're helping the air transport industry and then have raised APD so...

There is very little reason for not using LFDs as a post-travel testing system, especially for travellers coming from Green countries. There's even less reason to have testing required for vaccinated travellers... but that's not the direction the government is following.

I guess the fundamental problem with lateral flow is the false negatives and that some positives will be missed. Whilst it could be used for pre arrival, I imagine there is a need to have at least one post arrival test which is both highly accurate and able to be subject to genomic sequencing in the event of a positive result for the sake of monitoring.

Having a single PCR test on return would be far better than what we have now (with additional LFTs if needed). More manageable for the overstretched labs too.

So why is it used for the most frequent fliers and travellers around these days, i.e. hauliers and crew?

It makes absolutely no sense. Not for 'Green' countries, not for vaccinated travellers.

Just to illustrate this, if you are testing 100 people who are positive, there is an assumption that 99% of PCRs will come back positive. With LFD the figures vary somewhat by studies, but at worst it's 50%, at best it's 75% come back positive. If people do repeated tests and get good at doing the tests you probably do get to around 70%. It gets to 95% if that cohort is clearly symptomatic, which is the main basis of asking for a PCR. But missing half of positive cases as well as not tracking variants of concern is just a step too far at the moment, when you add in a domestic context where some of the more stringent lockdown rules are being relaxed in England and Wales.

The slightly more complicated aspect to this is we tend to assume PCRs are 100% accurate and therefore base LFD accuracy alongside this. We have found a very small number of cases which were positive on LFD, negative on first PCR and positive on a second PCR, so it's probably 97-99% accuracy for PCR.

Just to further complicate this, there is a little bit of evidence that asymptomatic cases are rising as a proportion of cases (which are otherwise falling in total number in the UK). The often quoted 30% seems now too low, it may even be as high as 50%.

Because, frankly, mass starvation isn't going to help anyone.

I'm sorry C-W-S but that's at best ingenerous.

You can't frame it in the logic of "either we test them or we'd had to close close" because a) it's not what I was asking and b) it then begs the question of what on Earth was HMG thinking from, say, January 2020 until April 6th 2021 when no air crew and no haulier was tested, although (at least crews) were subject to testing requirements for entering countries ranging from Ghana to Nigeria to Japan since, in some cases, the last quarter of 2020. I'm quoting from memory here so I might be wrong but I seem to recall that Brazil, prior to flights evaporating, was requesting crews to be tested. Brazil!! And Britain wasn't...

But my question remains: why are LFDs perfectly acceptable for people who travel a lot, get in close contact (at least crews) with a lot of passengers, but aren't for Joe Bloggs, returning from Green Country (let's say Iceland) after having been fully vaccinated and after, maybe, having hiked by himself the Hornstrandir where at best he's met an Arctic fox? If I remember correctly, you too - on this thread - were expecting LFDs to be used for return testing.

OK, I think that's jumbling a lot of things together. But firstly the twice vaccinated hikers of the Hornstrandir are sufficiently small as a demographic that very little policy is being made with them in mind. The demographics that worry us most are friends and family travellers, who probably constitute the main group travelling now. It's very difficult to stop, when you consider births, deaths and marriages. It's interesting to note this group has acquired a higher priority than leisure travellers, out of sympathy, but ruthless public health policies would permit lying on a beach, prohibit going to funerals. That isn't going to happen, but these people are mixing more intimately than the other extreme, road hauliers, who have just about the most solitary profession going. Britain is nothing like 100% self sufficient in medicines, food, oil products, pet food, vaccines, you name it. Hauliers as a working group are in short supply across Europe, and middle sized haulage companies will simply choose to work elsewhere on the mainland if you make things too difficult to travel to the UK.

Pragmatically you therefore let things slide with some groups until something better arrives. The big deliveries of LFDs happended in March, so again pragmatically they - and cabin crew - can now get ready access to LFDs, and indeed judging from this thread, these LFDs have now been rapidly distributed to the wider community, which is great to hear. This is a very different situation compared to say 6 months ago when even members of the National Security Council were denied access to tests. In the ideal world you would do something like LAMP testing at every port worldwide for all inbound travel, but in the absence of that LFDs will probably do, so long as when people get back we can PCR and genome sequence travellers. Hauliers and cabin crew will get LFD tests initially, again pragmatically, and at least if they have a positive test they can then be PCR'd. There is a separate PCR system for hauliers already in place at TruckStops, so it's not quite as black/white as you portray.