People in the UK are turning to mail-order coronavirus tests as the government scrambles to offer mass public testing and get a hold on the virus’ spread across the country.
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, recently returning to public life after testing positive for coronavirus, announced Thursday the UK would aim to test 100,000 Britons a day by the end of April.
Critics of the government’s stark U-turn on testing suggest it may have been spurred by about 8% of National Health Service (NHS) staff being off work because of Covid-19-related issues.
But at the moment, these government-funded tests by hospitals are unavailable to most people and are still reserved for those with severe symptoms and some health care workers.
In a tiny, airless office in Old Street in east London, the business Rightangled is offering a solution — at a price. The DNA testing firm is here hurriedly repurposing its DNA health testing kits to be mailed to customers for about £200 ($250) each. The coronavirus testing service sounds like a dream solution.
The kits arrive in the mail, you follow the video to take a swab from your throat, and send the sample back in a bio-hazard bag. The results come back around three days later.
But the price tag, unaffordable to many, is just one drawback.
CEO Abdullah Sabyah said he had thousands of orders in just a week, and is offering half-price discounts for staff in the UK’s free health care service, the NHS.
But even at a reduced price of £100 ($122) the tests do not provide a broad solution to the UK’s testing crisis.
The UK’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had said in mid-March that public “testing will be based on symptoms and severity” as the broad spread of the disease meant “it is no longer needed for us to identity every case.”
Yet Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s insistence last week that testing is “so, so important” means the UK is racing to make testing as widespread as possible just at the time when it is expected to reach its peak of infections.
Services like Rightangled have stepped into the gap. Yet some critics question whether they are benefiting their bottom line and the rich, and taking capacity away from a stretched testing industry that should now be focused on ensuring frontline health care workers are fit to go to work.
CEO Abdullah Sabyah said they had to set the price carefully “at a point in which we could afford the costs of the service [and] that would enable us to also offer discounts to people, as well as … bulk orders.”
He declined to name the laboratory that Rightangled uses to conduct tests, citing commercial confidentiality, but said the laboratory was government-approved.
The downside of the home-testing industry for coronavirus in the UK is that it is so new, the government has not granted regulatory approval for it.
A spokesman for the UK’s government Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, Neil Williams said: “There are no tests for sale to the general public from a pharmacist or to order at home that have authorization at the moment.”
A spokesman for Public Health England, also part of the UK Department of Health, added: “We don’t have confidence in their reliability.”
