10-minute test blitz to get UK back on its feet
Mass screening ‘will give us back our freedom’
‘Helping to avoid future lockdowns’
MASS testing for coronavirus will become ‘ the norm’ within weeks to kickstart the economy and prevent major local lockdowns, the Health Secretary revealed yesterday.
Matt Hancock promised a widespread screening programme by Christmas to give the country back its ‘freedom’.
Ministers are confident that faster tests – providing results in as little as ten minutes – can be used to fight any resurgence of Covid-19 this winter.
Entire towns or cities will be tested if they suffer a rise in infections. Staff at workplaces which have been found to be breeding grounds for the virus – such as food factories – could also be subjected to regular screening.
In addition, data-tracking will be stepped up to find flare-ups sooner and prevent city- wide lockdowns. The Office for National Statistics’ Covid-19 infection survey, carried out in England every fortnight, will be increased from 28,000 participants to 150,000 by October, before expanding further to cover 400,000 people.
The two-year project is set to cost £750million – but ministers hope this will represent good value if it leads to more targeted action and fewer large outbreaks.
Unveiling the plans yesterday, Mr Hancock pledged tests would be carried out on ‘an unprecedented scale’ in ‘one of the biggest expansions of surveillance testing we have ever seen’, starting immediately. He said ministers were ‘working as fast as we can’ to ‘make it the norm that people get tested regularly, allowing us therefore to allow some of the freedoms back’. ‘This is a really, really important drive that we have across government to bring in mass testing, population-wide testing,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Describing scientific breakthroughs as ‘incredibly important’, he continued: ‘At the moment you have to send off a test to a laboratory and get it back, and all the logistics of that takes time. It’s also quite expensive.
‘The point is that these new technologies mean that some of them, you only have to use saliva rather than having a swab all the way back down the back of your throat, which means that anybody can self-administer it much easier.
‘And some of them, they don’t need a lab on the test, which means you don’t have to send it off and get it back. So with the best ones, you get the result in ten minutes.’
A senior government source said: ‘Ultimately, the better you are at testing, the better you can control the disease without such strict controls on people’s lives... our focus is making sure that the [new] tests work and... looking at the ways we could use them and how they could help, where you would use them first and how they would be targeted.’
A Whitehall source added: ‘ The problem at the moment is that we are picking up people with symptoms but lots of the people who have Covid have it asymptomatically. We want to be catching as many people as possible who have got the disease and are transmitting it regardless of whether they have got symptoms or not.
‘Mass testing will be an incredibly important part of helping to avoid future lockdowns. If you can pick up someone with the virus pretty much instantaneously you are stopping the opportunity for them to be spreading it to other people and you are cutting off transmission chains as soon as you possibly can, so that means it is much less likely you are going to be having local spikes.’
The ONS Covid survey was described by Mr Hancock as the ‘single most important tool’ at the Government’s disposal for making pandemic-related policy decisions as it provides the greatest insight into how the virus is spreading.
Data covering regions and cities contributed to lockdowns in Leicester and large parts of the
North-West. However, increasing the scale of the ONS survey will mean it can provide more detailed estimates of infection rates at local authority level. Letters have been sent to tens of thousands of homes, inviting new participants to take part.
ONS analyst Katherine Kent said: ‘It isn’t going to be cheap, and obviously the Government has to consider the cost of the survey, but with the costs for the damage to the economy and the potential loss of lives they’ve clearly made the decision that this was the right investment.’
Oxford University professor Sarah Walker, co- leader of the survey, said it should help to uncover more crucial information about coronavirus. ‘The key question is “can I get it again?” – and because we are going back to households and because we will have enough people we can answer that question, not just overall, but by age, gender and ethnicity,’ she said.
Professor Sian Griffiths, former president of the Faculty of Public Health, said mass testing should reassure staff that they can return to work safe in the knowledge that colleagues are ‘virus-free’.
‘ Increased testing capacity underpins future management of keeping schools open and getting people back to work... and will be needed this winter even if a vaccine is available,’ she said.