THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR

SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that has won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity. ON THE face of it, mass testing for Covid-19 sounds reasonable. But looking at the details of the plan, it falls apart. Firstly, expense. Every household is entitled to dozens of tests a month. Even if the cost of the actual kits is relatively small we are talking about an enormous number of them, not to mention costs surrounding storage, admin, postage and other services. Billions will be spent on this. But are we absolutely 100 per cent sure this money couldn’t be better spent on other issues? The tens of thousands of missing cancer patients would be my preference.

Plan

Secondly, how well do the kits work? On a small scale they are useful, and we deploy them at our Rutherford Cancer Centres to anyone entering the building.

But that’s in the thousands, not tens of millions. We have a clear plan how best to use them and trained professionals administer them.

On a large scale, it’s far more difficult. Even with a minuscule false positive rate, that will cause chaos when millions are used each week. A confirmatory, more accurate, PCR test is required and again this takes time and resources.

Is it worthwhile?

Thirdly, when does it end? I see no exit plan. Are we going to carry on wasting billions on this indefinitely, even though the vast majority of those vulnerable to Covid have been vaccinated?

The chains between infection and hospitalisation have been broken – that shifts the fight significantly in our favour.

When the benefits are so unclear and the cost is huge, with so many other urgent problems in desperate need of attention, I don’t think vast mass testing is the best way to be using our limited resources.