‘We lost sight of how the virus was spreading in the rest of society’

Eleven weeks have passed since the UK suspended much of our normal activity to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. It was necessary to apply such broad and sudden measures because firstly, pressing the emergency stop button rather than veering out of control is a sensible move, and secondly it buys time which can be used wisely to work out a more finely tuned response in order to get going again. But such a response requires, crucially, information to allow finer judgements to be prudently made on how we proceed now.

One of the disastrous consequences of stopping testing and tracing in the community early in the pandemic is that we switched off the light on being able to see in detail the course of the infection in this country. When the vast majority of tests was confined to those so sick they had to be admitted to hospital as in-patients, and contact tracing was abandoned, we lost sight of how the virus was spreading in the rest of society. How many people were contracting Covid-19 without requiring hospital admission? What was their experience of the severity and length of their symptoms? How many had Covid-19, but suffered no symptoms at all? How old were they? Where did they live in the country? In what kinds of households? Where did they work? Who did they contract it from? In what kind of setting?

From this information, we could have built a detailed picture of how Covid-19 is transmitted in practice and understood much better what measures can be taken safely to release us from what the Prime Minister described to me at the Liaison Committee as “captivity”. Late in the day, some of that data is now coming through. Matt Hancock’s 100,000 a day target has allowed testing in the community to resume. The Office for National Statistics finally began, on April 17, a programme of testing a random sample of people across the country. And we hope to get some useful information from the contact tracers who started work 10 days ago. This detailed information is vital for decision-making and should be disclosed as soon as it is available. The daily press conferences and their presentation of overall positive tests and deaths from Covid-19, and an R number that is an average that hides much relevant variation in different settings, are no substitute for letting the public into a more detailed understanding of what is happening.

There are many important questions on which data must help answer.

Questions such as whether there is an appreciable benefit in quarantining passengers from places with much less risk of Covid-19 infection than the UK; whether we should all need to stay two metres apart irrespective of whether we are outdoors or in an enclosed space, or whether we are wearing a mask or not; whether universities and colleges can safely resume their vital work and prevent a lifelong blight on a generation of young people.

These are questions to which the answers could be known if we had information to answer them. From now on that must change and we must recognise that the cost and effort of collecting information is trivial in comparison to the consequences of not having it – needing to subject ourselves to blunt, rather than acutely targeted, measures.

Greg Clark is MP for Tunbridge Wells and chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee

‘We switched off the light on being able to see in detail the course of the infection in this country”