In all the excitement about the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, it was easy to miss news of the other great hope for getting our lives back to some form of normal. Vaccines are not expected to have much impact for most of us this winter and it will be several years before they suppress Covid-19 globally. For now, a mass testing programme — not any jab — is probably the best chance of putting Covid back in its box. It has been piloted this week in Liverpool and it might be coming to us all in the near future.
No one’s exactly sure yet how it will work, but you could start by imagining a world in which every other morning we all self-administer a rapid saliva test at home, with the results available within ten minutes. If your test is clear, you go off to work, knowing that you will not infect others. If it shows you have the virus, you isolate, take a more accurate test for confirmation and then access a government support programme. If, say, you were to visit a care home, or play team sports, or go to the theatre, it would become routine to queue for a rapid test beforehand.
As the tests get more sophisticated, we might imagine a world in which departing travellers go through Covid-19 security by simply blowing into a test machine before entering the airport. Arriving passengers might be given ten daily tests to self–administer instead of having to quarantine. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, is already talking about ending travel bans and instead having tests at airports, using fast-result technology that already exists.
It’s easy to scoff and say Britain will never manage it, but there is reason to hope. We’d need to issue up to ten million tests a day, some shared by everyone in a house.
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