Testing should reopen Britain, not close it

What is the purpose of testing for coronavirus? It cannot be simply to ascertain how many people have contracted the disease, or even to track them down and require them to isolate. Any rational system would allow people who have not tested positive for Covid to continue with their normal activities. Yet we have managed to construct a regime that can still require an individual to isolate for a fortnight even if there is no evidence they have the virus, while denying them the chance to get tested. When that person is the Prime Minister then surely the time has come to question the whole basis of this system.

Boris Johnson has announced he will be in quarantine for the next two weeks after an MP who visited Downing Street last week tested positive, and informed tracers of those with whom he had been in contact. They “pinged” Mr Johnson, as he put it, requiring that he self-isolate. A question arises as to why he did not take the precautions urged upon everyone else. But the obvious thing that should happen next is that the Prime Minister should be tested and, if he is negative, should carry on with his duties. After all, this is, to say the least, a serious time in the nation’s affairs.

However, he cannot have an NHS test unless he is displaying symptoms, which he isn’t. Rather than get a private test and risk being denounced by his opponents, he has retreated to his Downing Street flat for the duration. How can this in any way be sensible? Would the country really object to the Prime Minister being tested privately for Covid? Footballers are tested to ensure the Premier League can carry on but not, it seems, the Government.

Bizarrely, even if he were to test negative he would still have to isolate because he has been in contact with a carrier. If proof were needed that this is a flawed approach, surely here it is. We are spending billions on a testing system that is not only failing to reach the people it should, but forces the isolation of perfectly healthy individuals, often in key positions that are hard to fill.

The NHS is suffering staff shortages because so many doctors and nurses are having to self-isolate. This puts hospitals in danger of being overwhelmed by Covid patients and is the main reason why the country has been locked down again. The same problem is being seen in schools, with pupils and teachers being sent home to isolate. Why can’t they all be tested and allowed to return in the event of a negative result?

Testing should be designed to enable the restoration of normal life, not be yet another excuse to shut it down. It is welcome that visitors will soon be allowed into care homes if they test negative. This is not before time, given the inhumane separation of people at the end of their lives from their loved ones. But Matt Hancock ruled out any early changes to wider tracing requirements at the Downing Street news conference last night.

Mass lateral flow testing in Liverpool, under the Operation Moonshot project, is supposed to be the way forward by identifying asymptomatic carriers within 30 minutes. Of more than 100,000 who have been tested, just 0.7 per cent have been positive. The Government says if this pilot works it will be expanded across the country in a £100 billion scheme to help drive down transmission, underpinned by two diagnostic “megalabs” announced yesterday. But regular testing should be a passport to normality: people who are Covidfree must be allowed to carry on with their lives even if they have been in contact with a carrier, otherwise we will never get out of this cycle.

Covid is now endemic, as the Government’s experts acknowledge, and is not going to be defeated or “put back in its box”. Some countries like New Zealand claim to have eradicated it but they will have to remain closed to outsiders for ever to maintain that position.

Here in the UK – despite the undoubted good news of another Rna-based vaccine from the US company Moderna that is even more effective than the Pfizer jab announced last week – Covid-19 will continue to circulate in the population, just as flu does now. Testing, at whatever scale, is not going to eliminate the virus. Its purpose must be to help us live with Covid, not hide from it. But the real hope now lies with a vaccine.