Boris Johnson during a visit to a laboratory used for processing PCR tests in Glasgow. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell Britain’s success at vaccinati...
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Boris Johnson during a visit to a laboratory used for processing PCR tests in Glasgow. Photo: Jeff J Mitchell |
While Israel is emerging as the global test case for a country’s ability to inoculate its way out of Covid, the U.K. is a pilot for whether nations can do enough to end damaging lockdowns and essentially learn to live with the disease.
The key, Johnson believes, lies with mass testing in workplaces, schools, shopping centers, and theaters to make sure that employees, pupils, and customers are Covid-free. He’s expected to set out details in a statement to Parliament on Monday as part of a “road map” out of lockdown, and some companies in retail and hospitality are already gearing up.
Hundreds of thousands of tests could be sent out by post every day, including to secondary school pupils. The idea is to come down on outbreaks “like a ton of bricks,” according to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. It is these rapid tests, rather than “vaccination passports” being considered by other countries, that the government wants to be part of daily life.
The U.K. has suffered the continent’s highest death toll and its economy sank by the most since the Great Frost of 1709, albeit with a rebound in the fourth quarter. But on the other extreme, Britain has injected more than a quarter of its population with at least one vaccine shot and is also a frontrunner in identifying potentially more dangerous mutations of the coronavirus.
The question is not how to eradicate Covid, but to get to a point where people will never again be banished to their homes, schools closed and stores shuttered. Critics say previous testing failures contributed to the country’s death toll, while some epidemiologists say that potential route to a new normal is fraught with risk given the unreliability of so-called lateral flow tests compared with those that take longer to process.
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An emergency service worker collects Covid-19 test kits during a door-to-door mass testing operation in Maidstone, U.K. Photo: Chris Ratcliffe |
Johnson is well aware he’s walking a tightrope. Many within his governing Conservative Party are calling for the reopening of the economy more quickly. Retail sales that are the economy’s lifeblood fell more than twice as fast as expected in January, a report on Friday showed.
The government has signaled that it plans to proceed cautiously even with new cases and deaths falling dramatically, and more than a quarter of adults already vaccinated. Initial measures will include allowing some schools to reopen and permitting people in care homes to have “one regular indoor visitor” from March 8. The visitors will have to be tested before entering the facility and have to wear personal protective equipment, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in a statement Saturday.
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Britain has injected more than a quarter of its population with at least one vaccine shot. Photo: Jacon King |
A 22 billion-pound ($31 billion) testing program has ramped up U.K. capacity to rates that are among the highest in the world, with more than 760,000 tests carried out in one day earlier this month. That includes both lab-processed polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests that take a day or two, and the lateral flow tests that can give results within 30 minutes.
Companies are keen to embrace the rapid tests. Kate Nicholls, chief executive officer of the UKHospitality group, said the industry stood ready to roll out mass testing to make sure nightclubs and events such as conferences and weddings could restart “as swiftly as possible.”
Some companies are looking into potential “no jab, no job” contracts. Barchester Healthcare, which runs more than 200 care homes in the U.K., said it was considering whether “staff who refuse the vaccine on non-medical grounds will, by reason of their own decision, make themselves unavailable for work.” Health and social care workers already get regular tests, and businesses with more than 50 employees can order rapid tests via a government website. But there are concerns about false reassurances, and indeed how testing would work in practice for customers rather than workers.
The U.K. Cinema Association told the Daily Mirror newspaper that asking a 250-strong audience to take a test and wait 30 minutes before seeing a two-hour film “seems impractical.” It is also unclear whether companies will—in the longer-term—need to pay for the tests themselves rather than the state.
Some scientists believe the real focus should be on incentivizing people to stay at home for the required 10 days of isolation to ensure they don’t pass on the virus regardless of any mass testing.
Dido Harding, who runs the U.K.’s test-and-trace program, said this month that at least 20,000 people a day in England were failing to self-isolate properly. Government officials say that lateral flow devices are effective at detecting Covid-19, though anyone who tests negative should recognize that no test is 100% accurate.
“If hundreds of thousands of people are tested per week with lateral flow tests, there will be many false results,” said Duncan Robertson, a disease modeler at Loughborough University in England. If a negative test is seen as a “green light” to visit a nightclub there’s a “very real risk that people will engage in more risky behaviors when they may, in fact, be Covid positive.”