Professor Mark Ferguson:

Antigen testing does detect symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. It is really useful in mass testing for asymptomatic individuals because if someone feels perfectly well, he or she may not be motivated to roll up for a test so that is really part of the advantage.

I cannot really tell the Deputy why people are resistant. He would need to speak to those individuals but if we look at the data, we need to understand that a PCR test and an antigen test are about different things. Since this is a transport committee, people often talk about the PCR test as being the Rolls Royce test. According to this analogy, if one cannot have a Rolls Royce, one should not have any car but that is nonsense. If I wanted to travel through Africa, I would not use a Rolls Royce, I would choose a Land Rover. If I wanted to be green and save the planet, I would choose an electric car not a Rolls Royce that burns so much petrol per gallon. What that tells us is that it depends on the question one is asking. An antigen test basically detects infectious people. It detects an individual who has a viral load and is likely to have live virus and transmit it to other people. This is what we want to do. We want to remove those infectious people from the workforce, the aeroplane or general society and get them to isolate until they are not infectious. One then stops the spread of the virus. A PCR test detects the nucleic acid of a virus and that tells a person when he or she has a very small amount of virus that is not infectious, tells him or her when he or she is infectious and tells him or her when he or she is post-infectious - in other words, he or she is way over having had the symptoms but still has some traces of the nucleic acid. These tests are detecting different things. An antigen test will not tell a person whether he or she has ever had Covid or whether he or she is over the virus, it just tells someone whether he or she is infectious at that stage. The mentality that equates a PCR test with an antigen test is unhelpful. They are detecting different things.

By definition, any self-administered test is less accurate than a professional test but there is plenty of precedent for this. A woman can walk into a chemist shop, buy a pregnancy test and carry out that test and when she goes to the doctor, the doctor carries out another one so this is known. As already stated, training is very important. There are plenty of good videos. Taking the sample is very easy to do. Reading the test is very important and that can be aided with a photograph. Selecting the right commercial test kit is also important. Of course, no test is infallible. There are about one in 1,000 false positives with an antigen test while there are false negatives as well and people need to be educated about that. They need to be told that the test is not perfect but that is true of almost any test. We just need to think about the different contexts of the test.