COVID19 Test

With the national advice being to stay indoors if you are exhibiting any symptoms, there is currently no option to receive testing unless you are in the defined high risk groups having travelled from another country. At the moment, most tests are reserved for seriously ill patients in hospital and NHS front line staff.

Fusion Radiology works in partnership with Blue Horizon have made COVID19 Coronavirus tests available privately within the UK. PCR swab tests are carried out at UKAS accredited Laboratory by biomedical scientists.

• Fever which means a high temperature and you feel hot when touched on your back or chest. You do not necessarily need to measure temperature with a thermometer)
• A new, continuous cough – this means coughing a lot for more than an hour, or 3 or more coughing episodes in 24 hours (if you usually have a cough, it may be worse than usual).

It is also useful for people who believe they may have been exposed to the virus but as yet do not show any symptoms, specifically:

• Exposure or Potential exposure to someone who may have been diagnosed with the virus.
• Exposure or potential exposure to someone who may have or have had active symptoms described above.
• Anyone who would like to know their status for the presence of Coronavirus at this time right now.

If a patient wants to know if their symptoms are being caused by covid19, or whether they have been exposed to it from contacts and have the virus lurking in their nose and throat; and whether they need to self-isolate for the full 14 days and contact all their contacts – then it is the PCR test which they should have.

PCR (polymerise chain reaction) tests are used to directly detect the presence of an antigen, rather than the presence of the body’s immune response, or antibodies. By detecting viral RNA, which will be present in the body before antibodies form or symptoms of the disease are present; the tests can tell whether or not someone has the virus very early on. PCR tests can be very labour intensive and time consuming, with several stages at which errors may occur between sampling and analysis.  We now have 90 -95 % specificity – i.e. the chance the test is detecting the virus. Remember as we are looking at swabs taken from people, who have lots of other organisms floating around, we are essentially dealing with the question of how “right” the result we are looking at is.

Code: fusion10

Link: https://bluehorizonbloodtests.co.uk/collections/covid-19-coronavirus-tests

Throat self-swab collection instruction:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bedJdXAK6F4

If you have any further questions, please feel free to email info@fusion-radiology.com  or call on 01582249216