Can ‘surge testing’ get new variants under control?

A year on, in one sense we’re pretty well back to where we started — with the government attempting to snuff out the South African variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the same way as it did the original Wuhan version. It didn’t work then, and we rapidly moved to the second phase of the pandemic plan, where it was taken for granted that the virus had become widespread and it was a case of controlling rather than eliminating it.

Do we have any better chance of eradicating the South African variant? There is every reason to want to eradicate this variant in particular, as it has already shown itself better able to resist one of the Covid vaccines under development — interim results from phase three trials of the Novavax vaccine released last week showed 89 per cent efficacy in Britain, dropping to 60 per cent in South Africa, where 90 per cent of cases were the new variant.