Dr Waqar Rashid Dr Waqar Rashid

The Covid testing trap

(Photo: Getty)

We are in a time where money has lost meaning and value, so perhaps the £10 billion plus spent on Test and Trace doesn’t merit comment. But what do we get for our money? Well, we get a daily case tally which provides headlines for media outlets and endless graphs. We get a regional breakdown which shows us ‘hot-spots’ and we get an army of testers who follow the positive cases. We then find the virus in specific regions, chase it with more targeted testing and usually send the region into local lockdown as more positive cases are identified.

This cycle has been going on in some shape or form since the summer, starting in Leicester and then focusing more in areas in the north west of England. Bolton and Preston were early recipients of the testing merry-go-round but now as viruses in general rise and Covid cases increase commensurately, egged-on by the opening of universities, positive tests are now in the tens of thousands per day.

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