Here’s how the Covid nightmare could be over by Christmas

Matt Hancock has announced his ‘Moonshot’ project of achieving population-wide mass testing for Covid-19. He should be congratulated for this shift in strategy. The previous strategy of ‘Test, Trace and Isolate’ relied on people with the virus feeling ill and so taking a test. Those who tested positive would then be called by one of the NHS tracers to ask for their recent close contacts, who the tracer would in turn contact and ask to self-isolate.

While this approach has worked in the past with illnesses such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in countries such as South Korea, it is unlikely to work in the UK for Covid-19. The main reason for this is that up to 80 per cent of people with Covid-19 are asymptomatic, compared with around 15 per cent for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, and so are unlikely to feel ill enough to need to be tested in the first place.