I agree, that does sound a little promising.But here's the...

I agree, that does sound a little promising.

But here's the thing: if good things are still happening, why isn't the company telling us? I can't see why they couldn't. No news usually means bad news. And this halt has all the hallmarks of being used as an excuse for bad news.

Here's the other thing: the problem that POCT serology testers have in this country is that we have been way too successful with our containment efforts. In a country like the UK or US, it is quite likely that the case count underestimates COVID numbers by a factor of 3 or more, because their testing and contact tracing have both been lamentably poor (and it is too late to catch up now that the bat, I mean cat, is out of the bag).

But when we record cases in Australia as being about 7,000, it is likely that we are in the ballpark - maybe it's really 8,000, or 9,000, but not more. Because for us to miss an asymptomatic case completely, they have to be missed when health personnel do contact tracing of the person they got it from AND they have to be missed when those personnel do contact tracing of the people they gave it to. Some will be, but not many.

But let's assume there are really 12,000 people within our borders, who have antibodies to COVID-19. That is one in 2,000. Let's also assume that the Wondfo test has a 1% false positive rate and a 15% false negative. We test 2,000 people (1/12,000th of the total population) and find our one true positive (we got a bit lucky, because there's a 15% chance we miss even that one). We also get 20 false positives, 1%. We do PCR testing but the virus is long gone on our 1 true positive and was never there on our 20 false positives. So, now what do we do? If we tell these 21 people they are safe to join the wider community, we are misleading 20 of them.

Meanwhile, we have 1979 people who tested negative for antibodies. We have to treat them as non-immune, so back to isolation they go.

On this basis, we could serology test the whole population and set 240,000 of them free of isolation, almost all of them NOT immune, and we still have 99% of the population in isolation.

What have we really achieved?