Testing failures leave Britain shrouded in fear

The UK economy won’t bounce back to life until the Government fixes the system’s many deficiencies

Test, test, test – the World Health Organisation’s advice right at the start of this pandemic. Yet here we are, more than three months later, and we are still not doing it on the scale needed. At almost unimaginable economic cost, we instead remain trapped in some kind of half-baked lockdown, stumbling around in the darkness, not knowing whether the disease has been tamed or where it might strike next.

Governments around the globe have got themselves into a terrible mess in almost universally applying lockdown as an all-encompassing solution to the coronavirus pandemic. Having closed their economies down by diktat, they are more or less everywhere struggling to open them up again.

Conspiracy theorists who believe the virus was a deliberate act of sabotage by the aspiring economic and military superpower of China are having a field day. Incredible though their view might be, it has to be admitted that they have plenty of material to chew on. It’s not just that the illness originated in China, close to a laboratory that had been manipulating similar viruses to test for potential cures, or even the regime’s slowness in owning up to the scale of the problem. It is also that Beijing pioneered the heavy-handed, draconian lockdown as the most appropriate response.

This rapidly came to be seen as the gold standard for dealing with the disease, and was variously applied pretty much everywhere. Yet the economic consequences have proved far more damaging to liberal Western democracies than they have been for China. According to the latest International Monetary Fund assessment, Chinese output has already almost wholly recovered, but advanced economies will take at least until the end of next year to get back to the same place. The West’s relative dependence on consumption has made it much more vulnerable to social-distancing measures than China’s industrial-based economy.

So far, China has also got away with applying relatively lower levels of fiscal and liquidity support – just six per cent of GDP against more than 20 per cent in the UK, according to the IMF. The Middle Kingdom will therefore emerge from the crisis relatively stronger than it was, and Western economies relatively weaker. That much already seems clear.

It scarcely needs saying that we need to find a way out of the hole we have dug for ourselves – and quickly. Yet it is no longer as simple as merely removing the restrictions we were panicked into imposing. As long as there is a significant risk of reinfection, behaviour is likely to remain cautious, crimping the ability of key sectors to bounce back, almost regardless of whether there is a legally enforced lockdown or not.

So why is the Government still struggling with the comprehensive test, track and isolate system that might give the public the confidence it needs to know it is safe to go back in the water? To me, this failing has long been the biggest mystery of the whole sorry affair – comprehensive testing is key to unlocking the economy and allowing it to function properly again. Yet we are still not there.

Even Greg Clark, who as chairman of the Commons Science and Technology Committee has heard evidence from just about every high-level official and minister responsible for test-and-trace, has been unable to get meaningful answers. Everyone points their finger at everyone else. Public Health England says it is ministers and the scientists who make the decisions, the scientists say they had assumed the testing capacity was there and blame the Department of Health, which in turn blames Public Health England. Round and round it goes in impotent recrimination, and nobody gets a grip.

Ministers insist that we now have all the capacity we need, yet still it is treated as a scarce resource that has to be rationed. We know that the great bulk of infections are in hospitals and care homes, but workers in these institutions are not regularly tested, as they should be. The same goes for retirement homes and sheltered accommodation, where frequent testing, regardless of whether the person is symptomatic, should be routine – as it should be for those invited to self-isolate after coming into contact with a Covid carrier.

According to modelling by the American economist Paul Romer, we really ought to be testing the whole population at least once a fortnight to be certain of where infections are taking place, and containing them appropriately. With such an infrastructure, no more than 10 per cent of the economy would need to be closed at any one time, even if the so-called R rate was relatively high. By acting quickly against pockets of infection, the virus would, in time, be suppressed to the point of virtual elimination without needing to close down the entire economy.

The technology for such easily accessible, comprehensive and instant testing may not be quite there yet, but whatever its costs, they pale into insignificance alongside the ongoing damage to the economy of living in a permanent state of Covid fear.