U.K. starts mass study to track virus, weeks after halting tests

The UK government is to survey 20,000 households in a bid to track the spread of the coronavirus in Britain, five weeks after it abandoned a strategy of community testing for the disease.

The data will help scientists understand the rate of infection and how many people may have developed antibodies, the government said in an e-mailed statement on Thursday. The study’s participants will form a representative sample of the British population and initial findings will be available in early May.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been criticized for not doing enough to trace the virus in the population, after the director-general of the World health Organization stressed that testing should be the “backbone” of the global response. Though medics initially rigorously tracked the virus at the beginning of the UK outbreak and quarantined people as necessary, the government dropped the strategy on March 12 due to a lack of testing capacity and a belief it wouldn’t be useful.

Ministers in Britain are now trying to devise an exit strategy for a national lockdown that’s been in place since March 23, without causing a second peak of the virus. Latest figures show 18,100 people in Britain have died from the disease in hospitals—edging toward the 20,000 figures that the government said would be a good result—even before non-hospital deaths are included.

The UK’S Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said on Wednesday that the government’s priority is reducing the transmission rate of the virus to below 1, meaning that each Covid-19 case is passed on to less than one other person. he said they are considering what restrictions could be relaxed while still keeping a lid on the virus, though he warned that there wouldn’t be a swift return to normal life.

“As the transmission rate comes down, we need to get more data as to precisely where it is, in order to inform the measures we can actively consider,”first Secretary of State Dominic Raab, who is standing in for Johnson as he recovers from the virus, said on Wednesday when asked about how the lockdown might be lifted. “We’ve got to make sure we’ve got that evidence before we start touting around ideas.”

Bloomberg News