Why The Right Kind Of Herd Immunity Could Come Back Into Fashion
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Just say R
There was a moment in the No.10 press conference today that underlined the power and the pitfalls of the government’s coronavirus strategy.
Matt Hancock revealed, almost in passing, that in fact the UK’s testing capacity now stood at 108,000 a day. Yet within seconds critics were pointing out that the figure jarred with the 122,000 tests figure published last week that allowed the health secretary to surpass his totemic 100k target. Unsurprisingly, the practice of counting those swabs simply posted out (but not returned) was again questioned.
But Hancock’s target aside, it’s worth pointing out just how enormous that 108k figure is. Deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van Tam added that “there is another lab opening next week”, which suggests another 20,000 a day capacity on top. That would put the UK alongside, or even ahead of, Germany, with a capacity to conduct nearly a million tests a week.
Getting that testing rate up is obviously crucial to Hancock’s ‘test, track, trace’ (known as ‘TTT’ to some insiders) policy. The other key planks of the strategy are the new NHS smartphone app, due to go live on the Isle of Wight from Tuesday, as well as the 18,000 human contact tracers needed to roll out the scheme nationwide.
But the timing of that national rollout, and the lifting of the lockdown, no longer appear directly linked. Many have assumed in recent weeks that it’s only once the number of new Covid-19 cases is very low that ministers would feel confident enough to start the tracing policy that worked so stunningly well in South Korea.
And in perhaps the most interesting bit of the No.10 briefing, Hancock was at pains to deny any direct link between easing the lockdown and getting his TTT fully in place. “We haven’t said we can’t make changes before it is up and running. It is just that the test, track and trace...
