Test and Trace was an expensive failure

Before we had vaccines, NHS Test and Trace was supposed to be the breakthrough that would return us to a normal life. After all, testing, tracing and isolating contacts of infected people was credited with keeping Covid infections down in South Korea, Taiwan and elsewhere, so why wouldn’t it work here? 

Instead, we had a second wave and the return to normality was reversed. In September, Sage, the government’s scientific advisory committee on emergencies, was dismissive, saying Test and Trace was having only a ‘marginal effect’. A report by the National Audit Office in December, by which point the system had already cost taxpayers £22 billion, was equally scathing. At that time, the NAO discovered, the system was only returning 40 per cent of tests within 24 hours.

But what does the Department of Health and Social Care think of its own system? This week it has published an evaluation of the Test and Trace system — or at least of how it was operating last October (it is now estimated to be reaching most ‘close contacts’).