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 Under growing pressure to chart a way out of England's third
national lockdown and facing criticism of his handling of the
pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to speed up efforts to
get children back to school and revive businesses.
A plan under discussion in government for some time is to test much
of the population, with the aim of cutting transmission of the virus
by finding and isolating more of the one-in-three people with
COVID-19 who display no symptoms, two sources close to the testing
programme said.
But that plan is being held up, they said, by scientific and
clinical experts and policy advisers, some of whom question whether
the flaws in the rapid tests outweigh the benefits.
One source said previous dates pencilled in for launching nationwide
testing had been and gone, while the other said officials in the
test and trace programme were preparing "just in case" for next
month but were doubtful it would come to pass.
A spokeswoman for the health department said the government saw
"targeted asymptomatic testing" as a way to help "detect these cases
and break the chains of transmission", suggesting ministers were
not, as yet, moving to mass population testing.
"To help stop the virus spreading, hundreds of thousands of lateral
flow tests are being carried out every day, with the majority taking
place at dedicated tests sites for people without symptoms in a
range of community settings such as universities, schools, care
homes and workplaces."
'OPERATION MOONSHOT'
Johnson, criticised for a perceived reluctance to introduce measures
quickly in his COVID-19 response, in September hailed "Operation
Moonshot" – a plan that expanded the use of "lateral flow tests"
that give results in less than an hour.
He said such tests would enable more people to gather, particularly
over Christmas, and hoped their use would be widespread by spring
and then over the summer "could allow life to return closer to
normality".
But a new, more infectious variant of COVID-19 - first detected in
southern England - has complicated those plans.
Despite having rolled out vaccines against the virus more quickly
than many other countries, the government is now struggling to try
to stop the health service from being overwhelmed by hundreds of new
arrivals every day.
With the world's fifth highest death toll, Britain is also in one of
its deepest economic contractions on record.
Some in government say testing of the whole population could help
contain the virus while the vaccine roll-out continues, with the two
in tandem seen as key to the lifting of restrictions.
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 The lateral flow tests have
already been made available to staff in the
National Health Service (NHS) and care homes, to
schools, colleges and universities, and are
being rolled out to local authorities. Some
firms are also joining the scheme.
So far, more than 41,000 positive cases have
been detected through rapid testing.
MISSED POSITIVES
But not everyone believes mass testing is
helpful. The head of the World
Health Organization's (WHO) emergencies programme, Mike Ryan, said
last year broad population testing was costly and unrealistic even
if some testing of asymptomatic people can be helpful.
And several scientists say that while the lateral flow tests have
high specificity, meaning a positive test result is unlikely to be
false, their lower sensitivity may lead to as many as 50% of
positive cases being missed.
The health ministry spokeswoman said the lateral flow tests the
government uses "go through a rigorous evaluation by the country's
leading scientists". "They are effective at
detecting infectious cases of coronavirus, are easy to use and give
results in 30 minutes so those who test positive can isolate
immediately."
The government advice for self-testing with lateral flow tests says
"negative results do not rule out COVID-19 infection".
Still, proponents of conducting regular lateral flow tests of
populations say they can help identify the most infectious COVID-19
cases, particularly in workplaces, enabling quicker self-isolation
to stop localised outbreaks.
Dido Harding, the head of England's COVID-19 test and trace system,
said while no test was perfect, the lateral flow tests were
"extremely useful" because of their speed, easy distribution and
ability to pick up asymptomatic cases.
"Taking a lateral flow test twice a week, week in, week out, will
detect 75% of the people who have got the disease, who don't know
they've got it," she told an event at the Confederation of British
Industry this week.
"And in doing that you break the chains of transmission, you stop
outbreaks from growing in your workplace and in your community, and
we get more of the economy back going faster."
(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper, Alistair Smout and Paul Sandle;
Editing by Alex Richardson)
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