The UK government has drawn up plans to carry out up to 10 million covid-19 tests a day by early next year as part of a huge £100bn expansion of its national testing programme, documents seen by The BMJ show.

The internal correspondence reveals that the government is prepared to almost match what it spends on the NHS in England each year (£130bn) to fund mass testing of the population “to support economic activity and a return to normal life” under its ambitious Operation Moonshot programme.

A briefing memo sent to the first minister and cabinet secretaries in Scotland, seen by The BMJ, says that the UK-wide Moonshot programme is expected to “cost over £100bn to deliver.” If achieved, the programme would allow testing of the entire UK population each week.

The leaked documents reveal a heavy reliance on the private sector to achieve the mass testing. Firms named are GSK for supplying tests, AstraZeneca for laboratory capacity, and Serco and G4S for logistics and warehousing.

Commenting on the leaked plans, Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said they bore the hallmark of a government “whose ambition far exceeds its ability to deliver.”

He said, “This plan transmits unbounded optimism, disregarding the enormous problems with the existing testing and tracing programmes. Worse, it envisages a major role for Deloitte, a company that has presided over many of these problems. It focuses on only one part of the problem, testing, and says nothing about what will happen to those found positive, a particular concern given the low proportion of those who do adhere to advice to isolate—in part because of the lack of support they are offered. What parliamentary scrutiny will there be of a programme that would cost almost as much as the annual budget for the NHS [in England]? However, on the basis of what is presented here, this looks less like Apollo 11, which took Neill Armstrong to the moon successfully, and more like Apollo 13.”

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3520



For a government that has yet to produce a track and trace app for a few thousand people despite spending £12m on the project, and that has spent £10bn on the current test and trace scheme, which has rapidly become a shambles, a "Moonshot" may not even make it to the launchpad .....

The plan involves increasing current testing alongside developing new, rapid tests. Some are swab tests of the nose and throat, others tests of saliva from spit in a pot. What they have in common is the results can be processed on the spot, without the need to send tests away to a laboratory. But the technology the new tests are based on has not been proven to work yet.

Dr Nathalie MacDermott, infectious diseases expert from King's College London, says the idea of a rapid test is feasible but "we don't know how accurate and sensitive they are yet". And then there are the logistics of getting them to people and collating the results. "Tests could be organised by workplaces and schools," she says. "But then you could have queues of people waiting outside for test results." And how would that be managed if 70,000 people wanted to get into a stadium, for example?

Prof David Spiegelhalter, statistician from the University of Cambridge, meanwhile, tells BBC News there is a "huge danger" of false positives - people being a given positive test result when they do not actually have the virus. "Mass screening always seems like a good idea in any disease," he says. But tests are rarely 100% accurate. With a 1% rate of false positives, testing the whole UK population of 60 million would see "600,000 people unnecessarily labelled as positive". And this could create challenges if they and their close contacts had to self-isolate and take time off work or school.

Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer for England, admits implementing mass testing would be "quite challenging". Rapid tests are already in the pipeline and could be ready in a "reasonably short time frame", she says. But manufacturing, supplying and distributing these tests would be a major hurdle.

Regular asymptomatic testing has only just started in care homes after many months of the government saying it would happen. Wider testing of people without symptoms isn't always useful unless it's carefully managed, because a negative test result doesn't necessarily mean 'not infectious'. It may just mean someone is in the early stages of infection and the test hasn't detected enough virus to give a positive result.

Edward Argar confessed plans to "prioritise" Covid-19 tests will mean some sick members of the public are officially forced to wait while others get tested first.

It means people who have coronavirus could see themselves held back for crucial hours or days before finding out whether they have tested positive. That, in turn, will delay efforts to alert their close contacts and tell them to go into isolation.

According to the Telegraph, a priority list to be released within days currently suggests routine testing could be restricted to hospitals, care homes, certain key workers and schools.

For a government that has yet to produce a track and trace app for a few thousand people despite spending £12m on the project, and that has spent £10bn on the current test and trace scheme, which has rapidly become a shambles, a "Moonshot" may not even make it to the launchpad .....

Boris Johnson’s Operation Moonshot coronavirus scheme has been quietly swallowed up into the NHS Test and Trace system and the government has abandoned plans to spend £100bn on the ambitious plan for mass testing of millions of Britons, new papers have revealed.

A leaked letter last month stated that 6 million tests were expected to be provided each day in a programme - believed to be driven by the PM’s top aide Dominic Cummings - which would “cost over £100bn to deliver” and that plans were already in place for 3 million by December.

But a letter from government lawyers has now revealed that the operation has been “subsumed” into the widely-criticised NHS Test and Trace programme led by Baroness Dido Harding, which is currently testing around 280,000 people a day with a target to increase the figure to 500,000 by the end of October.

Coronavirus: £100bn budget for Operation Moonshot dumped as project swallowed up by Dido Harding’s Test and Trace

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...-b1221920.html



No surprise there - expensive government debacle .....

Testing capacity is rising (The UK is testing more per head of population than most other countries already) but I don't suppose doing that is easy when the rest of the planet wants the same chemicals to make tests with too.