Contact tracing may be more of a placebo than a cure

We have been told by the Government that an effective test, track and trace programme is the key to ‘controlling’ Covid-19, allowing us to further unlock the country and take the economy out of its induced coma. The effectiveness of contact tracing depends on wide ranging factors including how many people have the virus but don’t show symptoms, the accuracy and speed of testing, levels of surveillance, the number of people that come into contact with an infected person and how many people comply with requests to self-isolate. Unfortunately for the Government the odds are not in their favour with Covid-19.

This week the Office for National statistics and the University of Oxford released their third set of findings from their Covid-19 Infection Survey. Over a two-week period they performed 18,913 tests within 8,799 households. They found that around 80 per cent of people who tested positive for the virus did not have symptoms when tested, and that the number of people currently infected in England is at least 62,000. Although