I’ve been thinking about this one since Prime Minister Boris Johnson mentioned it on Monday. He claimed that the way to get nightclubs open again was to use lateral flow tests.
You can read about these elsewhere, but the gist of it would be that you arrive at the club and do a test. You would have your results in 15 minutes, and assuming your result is negative, you would then be granted entry. Sounds straightforward enough, no?
So what happens if the test comes back as positive? Obviously they would be denied entry, but how would you get them back home? The last time I checked, you can’t exactly bundle Covid positive people into the back of a taxi, can you? And what happens to anyone they arrived with – do they get refused entry and told to go home and self isolate for 10 days, as per government guidance?
Do people in the queue have to practice social distancing? Where are venues supposed to keep you during that 15 minute waiting time for your result? Who will actually carry out the test – the clubbers or the staff? Who has to pay for the tests and will clubbers have it added to the price of their ticket?
What happens if the result comes back as inconclusive? What happens if someone refuses to do the test – how will they be removed, knowing that they might be Covid positive?
And this is before you even get into questions about how accurate the lateral flow test actually is.
Why do I get the distinct feeling that, not for the first time, Boris Johnson is talking out of his defecatory orifice?
[…] aside some pretty monumental questions about how you actually do that safely, this is generally good news. If nothing else, it helps make […]