Thanks micc. It's certainly very hard to make sense of things....

Thanks micc. It's certainly very hard to make sense of things. According to WHO and others the average time between infection and first appearance of symptoms is five days. So if you went to a health provider for a test after three days of symptoms there would be a pretty strong statistical likelihood that if you had the virus it would be detected by the finger-prick test. Of course, it would have to be explained to you that a negative result was no guarantee you were definitely negative, and perhaps a follow up test a week later could be arranged. That may not be the ideal system, but it seems that it could be extremely useful in many ways as part of broader measures. And if it enables more testing to start happening more quickly, that is also obviously very important.