A testing time for many during pandemic

Have you had a coronavirus test recently?

I woke up at 3am last Friday and turned on the TV. The BBC was showing ‘Panorama’. No, not the ghastly building here in Ashford but the investigative programme.

It took us into a mass-testing site in Milton Keynes - a site in which thousands of our test kits were checked and evaluated.

Included in the show were three experts who were invited to comment on the working practices at the site. They unanimously condemned the cross-contamination they saw and the generally sloppy working which meant that many - a great many - results were wrongly reported.

So, if you had a test around December and January this year, you might have thought you were positive

(or negative), quite wrongly. Either way you may - or may not - have gone into self-isolation as a result of misleading information.

Incidentally, it’s probably worth mentioning that the testing site itself became plagued with many cases among the workers, spread through bad hygiene practices - lack of social distancing and so-on.

Does it matter that this kind of thing is also costing us million, or billions of pounds? But then, our ministers love to quote the number of billions they’ve been spending while, all the time, the pandemic has done more damage to our people than it has to most other countries.

I imagine it would be a fair bet that the pandemic has done wonders for sales of champagne. We hear that ‘cronyism’ put millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into the hands of those who know the people who could put contracts for PPE into their hands - even when some didn’t even come up with the goods.

I heard a news broadcast early last year on which Jacob Rees-Mogg declared that the pandemic would provide some with a great opportunity to make money. You have to give him credit for foretelling the future.

The BBC was showing ‘Panorama’. No, not the ghastly building here in Ashford but the investigative programme.