God bless Jeremy Hunt – and I never thought I would hear myself say that. But according to a report in the Guardian, Hunt, who now chairs the Health Select Committee, is calling for mass population testing.
“I would really want to expand the whole testing programme so we can almost get to a point where we are testing the whole population every week,” he told ITV’s Acting Prime Minister podcast.
“I think this mass testing”, he went on, “could potentially be linked to an app on your phone so that you could show people on your phone the last time you got tested….. If you had population testing there’s no reason why you, theoretically, would need to have social distancing: you could pretty much carry on life as normal because you’d just know that everyone you’d mix with had been tested very, very recently.”
YES……. Has that not always been the obvious way to go? Way back in May I reckoned I could solve the problem with a very similar suggestion. All we needed at that point was the actual test but surely by now we must have one.
The tragedy is that if over the next few months we do get a system such as Hunt is suggesting which allows life to return to normal, it will already be too late for the thousands of companies that have been forced out of business and the tens or hundreds of thousands of workers who have lost their jobs.
You, Me and Food Allergies
Absolutely! Well said Michelle…. So many people would welcome this.
As you say, this would be brilliant.
It sounds good in principle, but it would only work if the tests were reliable enough, which they seem to me not to be so far. I keep coming across people who have been tested using every type of test, sometimes several times, only to get a negative when it is pretty clear they’ve had COVID and other household members test positive. It worries me how much we can rely on the results, you know.
True – but if they focused scientific energy of getting a test that works rather than on a whole bunch of vaccines that probably never will, they might well achieve a reliable one!!