5 Fibs You Were Told This Week
“Moonshot” – “an ambitious, exploratory and ground-breaking project undertaken without any expectation of near-term profitability or benefit and also, perhaps, without a full investigation of potential risks and benefits”.
This definition is freely available to anyone with a computer and the ability to type so it was rather surprising and slightly worrying this week when the term “moonshot” became synonymous with the UK government’s latest attempt to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Did the PM genuinely just describe his own policy as a moonshot
— Ed Gamble (@EdGambleComedy) September 9, 2020
1) The Moonshot
The UK government doesn’t have a great record when it comes to testing for and tracing coronavirus, so it was a bit of a surprise when on Wednesday they announced an even more ambitious plan.
Operation Moonshot is a plan to process “literally millions” of tests “every single day”, using new “simple, quick and scalable” tests that could determine whether someone had coronavirus in as little as 20 minutes.
The PM said: “We believe that new types of test which are simple, quick and scalable will become available. They use swabs or saliva and can turn round results in 90 or even 20 minutes.
“Crucially, it should be possible to deploy these tests on a far bigger scale than any country has yet achieved - literally millions of tests processed every single day.
“We are hopeful this approach will be widespread by the spring and, if everything comes together, it may be possible even for challenging sectors like theatres to have life much closer to normal before Christmas.”
While it all sounds absolutely marvellous, when you actually look at the monumental hurdles in the way it all seems a bit ... out of this world.
The technology doesn’t even exist yet, there would be a massive problem with false negative results and there’s not even a plan for how everyone in the country would get receive enough tests regularly enough to do one...
