Worse tales have emerged during the pandemic than that of the ‘Florence Three’ – Rhys James, Quinn Paczesny and Will Castle, who have all now returned home to Britain after 61 days incarcerated in a hotel in the Italian city. Some might say a couple of months stuck in Florence could have been a blessing – and so it might have been, had they not each been stuck in solitary confinement and fed microwaved mush, with no more chance to go out to a trattoria than to visit the Uffizi.
But what stands out about the story of the Florence Three is not so much their plight, but what it tells us about Covid-19 tests. The three men, who are aged between 20 and 23, met in Northern Italy while teaching English over the summer. They then set out to see the sights of Venice, followed by Florence. While in Venice, two of them developed mild symptoms and isolated in a rented flat for several days. They then travelled to Florence, where they decided that the responsible thing to do would be to take a Covid test. All three tested positive and were obliged to isolate in a hotel. They would be allowed to leave, they were told, when they produced two negative tests in a row. After that, all three were tested every week but continued to test positive, so were forbidden from leaving – in spite, they say, of doctors telling them that they couldn’t be infectious any longer and that the test must be picking up fragments of dead virus.
What stands out about the story of the Florence Three is not so much their plight, but what it tells us about Covid-19 tests
This is exactly the problem that Professor Carl Heneghan of the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine warned about in July, and which Korean scientists noticed as far back as April: false positives, thanks to tests picking up traces of dead virus left over from infection weeks earlier.
Korea’s National Medical Centre discovered the problem after 263 people tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, despite having overcome the infection and previously testing virus-free. The story caused a panic – questioning the assumption that being infected would provide immunity from further infection – until dead virus was found to be the cause. The Korean scientists said that it was possible to test positive for up to two months after your immune system has defeated the infection – indeed, just as the Florence Three have done.
If so, it makes you question the accuracy of Covid statistics. According to the ONS infection survey – which tests a random sample of people every week to judge the incidence of infection in the population at large – 433,300 of us had the infection at some point last week. But how many are really infected and how many are just showing traces of dead virus from weeks earlier?
PCR tests used in the UK go to the laboratory (which is why they take so long, at least 24 hours). Italy, on the other hand, is happy to make more use of rapid ‘LAMP’ (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) tests which produce results in half an hour. You would hope that UK tests, as a result of the extra time and expense, are more accurate. But then rapid testing with LAMP tests is the basis of the government’s next big idea to get us back to a normal life – the so-called Operation Moonshot, capable of testing 10 million people a day. The tests are currently being trialled with NHS staff. They will have to be rather better than the tests used on the Florence Three.
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