Agreed. Aside from the current shortage, I would use them more often if it were not for the single use plastic. It must be possible to make them with just a strip of card with some coating along the edges. Maybe using two circles instead of lines. Do I need a trip to the patent office?

I know the answer I am waiting for! ;)

I must admit after having got through 200 of the things I wonder myself, but I can't see an easy route. The LFD is a plastic shell around a paper or polymer pad, with 2 membranes on it. The C membrane will show the dye when enough liquid gets that far, so it's testing mainly for sufficient fluid. The T line has another small membrane, not much more than a millimetre wide, with antibody reagents, which turn red if it detects the presence of viral fragments - the reagents congregate on the line and thus changes colour. Then there is a wick under the top plastic, which you can't see, buried under the QR code at the top, which sucks up excess fluid. You can't avoid the porous pad that runs most of the length of the plastic, nor the 2 dye membranes. You need to wrap it in something so you get the droplet area, I guess it could be cardboard, and it also needs to be capable of mass production in a sterile factory. So it's not surprising it ends up being plastic. They could be recyled in due course, but clearly the appetite for handling used LFDs isn't going to be high. LFDs would be inert after a few days, so that should not really be a barrier to recycling.

How many days were you positive, going by LFDs?

I got some from my workplace in Europe that are like this: It looks like a cardboard greeting card, you open it up like a greeting card, it has glued inside one half a tiny plastic well about the size of the swab head, in which you place the sample swab and add drops of fluid. The opposite facing page has the testing strip with a wick lined up to the well. You then close the card with an adhesive strip, and there is a small cutout in the front where you can read the result of the strip. So it contains a small amount of plastic to hold the sample drops, but mostly made of cardboard. Personally I find it a bit fiddly to use, particularly to get the test strip to wick the solution properly once the card is closed.

Hey, I read the news!
Still, there's no denying that the idea of Theranos was great. Sure, [SPOILER!] it never worked and it was a scam, but still...

Just don't say it works with a single drop of blood!

Thanks, that's interesting. Indeed a "mechanical/chemical" solution cannot be re-usable. I wonder if there was some way to AI this thing, like DeepMind did with their AI checking eye scans for glaucoma... but it might be a bit of an overkill. Still, it was a fun mind game.

As for positive results: having checked my own records, I was positive from the 21st of December to the 25th. On the 25th I began having very faint T lines, and nothing from the 26th. I have to say, my symptoms were super mild. A cough every now and then, a sore throat on the first day or so (which prompted me to test). What hasn't quite returned is my sense of smell, which is annoying. I still am negative, day 2 PCR also reported negative.

Same here. Sense of smell was last to return. That was about a week after negative tests.

So at the outside you may have tested weakly positive on 20 Dec - and probably got the infection on 18 or 19 December. You seemed to have a lot of virus to be positive for so long, so in a sense a bit of a danger with vaccines: they presumably allowed it to be quite mild in your case, but you would clearly have been an infection risk to anyone from say 20 December to Christmas Day. Had you been clobbered with COVID you'd have been in bed anyway.

Karfa is your man for the advice!

If they put Elizabeth H. in the same cell with Martin Sh. they should be able to work on this and come up with something good....:p

Oh, I thought one week of Covid was actually good going - most people I heard were positive for 2 straight weeks.

Luckily I managed not to pass it to anyone in the family and I was by myself from the 21st onwards.

Yeah same here took about 2 weeks from symptoms start to getting taste and smell back.

Looks like no more restrictions in England, and maybe plan B being cancelled end of Jan?

Now hopefully they remove the pointless travel covid testing bureaucracy and things will be looking much better over the next coming weeks.

Daily data:

Cases 218,724 (129,471 last Tuesday)
Deaths 48 (18)
Patients in hospital 14,216 (8,526 on the 24th)
Patients in ventilation beds 883 (835 on the 24th)
People vaccinated up to and including 3 January 2022:
First dose: 51,820,652
Second dose: 47,482,789
Booster: 34,363,986

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now up 50.9% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is up 51.8%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 129.9 today. It is another catchup day today with cases and deaths covering a few days for Wales & NI. Cases in England are up very slightly, from around 142k to 148k.

According to Sky News, it is 4 days of NI data and 2 days of Wales data, which explains why cases are over 200k. I think it'll take a few more days to see what is really going on once we have settled down from the holiday period.

The daily figures are all over the place due to the holidays, but the 7-day average (which evens out some of the erratic reporting) is at a record high today: 181,411, compared to 169,997 yesterday and 120,191 a week ago.

And no disrespect to DaveS, who brings these figures to us every day, but you can find all this information on the government's covid dashboard so you don't have to rely on Sky News (or any other news outlet).

Yes, this is certainly the case.

One thing that is becoming quite apparent is that NHS Trusts throughout the country are really beginning to struggle with people off sick with Covid. My other half is a doctor and has just been asked to work nights over this weekend to cover shortages, and I know a lot of others in similar situations across many different Trusts.

The issue isn't simply that there are "x%" of doctors or nurses off at any given time, but one of resource allocation at appropriate levels, specialties and hospitals. These rotas tend to already be very 'lean' - there is typically very little spare capacity, and sometimes there were already gaps. Covid makes this situation very difficult.

One situation I am familiar with is a good example: for a given ward in a particular hospital there are 6 'juniors', and three more senior non-consultant doctors (registrars) on the rota - which has to cover nights, weekends etc. Presently 50% of the former and one of the latter are off with Covid - and a second registrar is just back having had it. By the time you try to cover nights/weekends, you're into "battlefield rostering" and at serious risk of simply not having enough doctors to provide care and oversight. You can't simply shift people from other wards when they face similar issues.

We can hope that this is very much a temporary problem and that after a few cycles of 7-10 days things will get better. But for patients needing hospital treatment for anything in that time, this is not a good situation to be in at all. Similarly for already exhausted healthcare staff who are stepping up as much as possible to cover rotas.

Edited to add: this Twitter thread yesterday by Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers (which represents trusts), is worth reading in full. It is a sensible and balanced summary of the situation as it stood yesterday morning


I've quoted some of the relevant bits on staffing below