Was there ever a national crisis which was so easy to solve? There are reports of supermarket shelves emptying, petrol stations running out of fuel and panic-buying. This in not unprecedented. Yet on this occasion the government doesn’t have to deal with a bolshie trade union, enter difficult negotiations with an EU which is determined to punish us for Brexit or even handle the early, unknown stages of a pandemic. All the Prime Minister has to do is to announce that the changes to the Test and Trace system already earmarked for 16 August – when fully-vaccinated people will no longer be forced to self-isolate for ten days but could be advised to get tested instead – be enacted immediately. The panic would immediately be over.
Why won’t Boris Johnson do this? Anyone would think that the Test and Trace system had actually worked. Yet according to the minutes of a SAGE meeting last September, scientific opinion was that it was then making ‘marginal’ difference to infection numbers.
There is good reason to doubt whether Test and Trace is achieving anything
It is a view which was repeated by the Commons public accounts committee in March this year, and it is hard to believe that it is any better now.
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