Could ten million Covid tests a day get Britain back to normal?

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.