17m new virus tests on way
ONE in four Britons could be tested for coronavirus to try to shorten the lockdown.
In a sign that ministers have finally accepted the urgency of mass testing, officials have agreed deals to buy 17.5million kits for use by mid-April. They hope to identify contagion hotspots as well as people who are immune.
The tests would help get NHS staff back to work with screening of frontline workers, such as teachers and police officers, to follow. The programme could see movement restrictions lifted earlier than the six months suggested by the Government’s scientific advisers yesterday. ‘The top priority is randomised testing to establish how far the
disease has spread,’ a Whitehall source said. ‘That is critical to understanding what we are dealing with and shaping our response.’
Officials have identified suppliers that can make the tests and have agreed ‘in principle’ to purchase 17.5million if they pass medical checks. Britain is currently conducting only ‘antigen’ testing – a swab that requires laboratory analysis.
However, the new ‘antibody’ fingerprick tests take 15 minutes to detect whether someone has had the virus.
Jeremy Hunt, a former health secretary, believes testing is key to the relaxation of social distancing measures.
Writing in today’s Daily Mail, he asks: ‘Is it too far-fetched to aim to be the first country that tests every single member of the population at home? In these extraordinary times, with our great British willpower, anything is possible.
‘Mass social distancing will help flatten the curve, but only testing will save us from months, maybe years, of anguish and economic paralysis.’
Professor Jason Leitch, the Scottish Government’s national clinical director of healthcare quality and strategy for the NHS, said yesterday health workers in Scotland are already being tested to get them back to work more quickly. He added: ‘We have started that already.’
Two groups of patients in Scotland are currently tested – those in hospital with respiratory symptoms and a sample of the population tested via GP surgeries to give health officials an idea of the spread of the virus.
As the UK’s death toll rose by another 209 to reach 1,288:
▪ Consultant Amged El-Hawrani became the first frontline NHS worker to die from the virus;
▪ Deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said it was likely to be three to six months before the lockdown was lifted;
▪ Boris Johnson continued to chair meetings from isolation in Downing Street;
▪ The number of cases in Scotland surged by 139 to 1,384;
▪ Another person in Scotland died, bringing the death toll to 41;
▪ 95 Scots patients are in intensive care with confirmed or suspected Covid-19’
▪ Miss Sturgeon said she would pass emergency legislation to prevent evictions while Scotland is locked down;
▪ Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab prepared to unveil a deal with commercial airlines to repatriate stranded Britons;
▪ Michael Gove took a swipe at China, saying its failure to be open about the virus had hindered the world’s response;
▪ Labour MP Stephen Kinnock was criticised by police for making a birthday visit to see his 78-year-old father Neil.
Iceland has already carried out a population-wide testing programme and Norway announced one yesterday.
Scientists fear that lifting restrictions too early – before the virus is in retreat – could lead to a second spike in deaths.
Paul Hunter, a professor of epidemiology at the University of East Anglia, said: ‘If we know, through mass antibody testing, that a large proportion of the population is immune, you could lift social distancing much earlier.’
Ministers decided earlier this month to reserve all Britain’s testing capacity for those in hospitals. That left officials ‘blindfolded’ in their response to the crisis, the World Health Organisation has warned.
The Government has been fiercely criticised for failing to prioritise testing, with the daily figures failing to yet hit 10,000. In Germany, by comparison, officials are testing more than 70,000 people a day.
Even frontline NHS staff were not being tested until this weekend, which meant 20 per cent were in self-isolation last week. Professor Eleanor Riley, an infectious disease expert at Edinburgh University, said: ‘Mass antibody testing will give us a much better idea of how widely the virus has spread in the population.’
My sister has just returned to her home in Beijing after some weeks in the UK. She was allowed back into china only under the strictest conditions because, i’m afraid to say, the chinese regard our measures to contain the virus as inadequate.
She and her children were met at the airport by medical staff and their temperatures taken before they were driven home for a mandatory two-week quarantine.
My sister’s husband, who had stayed in Beijing, was required to leave the family home and check into a hotel. Then they sealed her front door and ordered her and the children not to leave. a police car patrols regularly up and down her street and she must submit her and her children’s temperatures through an app twice daily.
To Westerners, this may seem like a grotesquely disproportionate and illiberal response. But i’m afraid these sorts of measures, with testing and contact-tracing at their heart, show us the only way out of this crisis. covid-19 emerged in china and spread out into asia. But that region now seems to have the virus under control without the blanket lockdowns we see in europe. lockdowns can work but they are the bluntest of instruments in any pandemic.
Shopping malls are open in Taiwan and starting to reopen in mainland china. Restaurants are doing good business in South Korea. and in Singapore, where there have been just three deaths, offices are open as usual. in many of these places, you have to pass through a machine taking your temperature before you are allowed in. Those with fevers must go home to isolate.
Because of their terrifying experience with the Sars outbreak of 2003, asian governments viewed covid-19 from the outset as a potentially lethal virus. in the West, conversely, it was viewed by many as a rather nasty flu. Now the death toll is over 1,200 in the UK, a rough rule of thumb used by modellers at imperial college london suggests we are likely to have over a million cases here. Michael Gove said it is doubling every three to four days. But because we stopped testing in the community two weeks ago we do not know where those cases are.
Of course, we would like to do more testing and the Government has made big efforts to expand this. But now that the whole world has now woken up to its importance, there is a global shortage of testing kits. So if we want to avoid lockdowns during the next wave of the virus – any time in the next year to 18 months until we can get a vaccine – we will need to manufacture testing kits at home.
We need a huge national effort, just as we have made with ventilators. We should aim to be the first country able to test all its health and care frontline staff every week so they can be confident they are not infecting their own patients. We owe our brilliant and brave frontline professionals no less. We need to do not just the basic diagnostic test, but also the anti-body test so we know who has the virus, who has had it and who can return to work safely.
And we need to ramp up the contacttracing which accompanies every test so we track down and test every single person who an infected patient has been near during their infectious period. Public health england has just 290 people dedicated to this – we probably need that number in every city and county in the country.
We are europe’s tech hub. So let’s also enlist our brilliant tech companies to emulate Singapore, where everyone has been instructed to download an app called TraceTogether on to their phones. if they contract the virus, all their recent contacts can be downloaded by medical personnel so they too can be tested. Some say this overly intrusive, but could it actually be any more irksome than being confined to your home by the State as is happening in an extreme form in italy today?
TeSTiNG earlier may also be the reason why countries like Germany – running four times as many tests as we are – have much lower death rates. if through testing you find someone vulnerable with the virus earlier, you can get them vital hospital care before they deteriorate.
The NhS’s response to date has been magnificent and awe-inspiring, which is no surprise to me as a former health secretary. in such a short time to have created three brand new field hospitals, freed up an extra 33,000 hospital beds and recruited 18,000 recently-retired nurses and doctors alongside an army of volunteers is a superhuman achievement. health Secretary Matt hancock and NhS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens should rightly be proud.
But if we are to reduce the pressure on the NhS later in the year when the virus could well be back, we need to start ramping up asian-style testing now. is it too far-fetched to aim to be the first country that tests every single member of the population at home? in these extraordinary times, with our great British willpower anything is possible. Mass social distancing will help flatten the curve, but only testing will save us from months, maybe years, of anguish and economic paralysis.