April 23, 2020

expert reaction to comments made at today’s daily COVID-19 press conference around testing initiatives (Thursday 23 April)

The Number 10 press conference on Thursday 23rd April, included the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, the Government Chief Scientific Add visor, Sir Patrick Vallance, and Prof John Newton, coordinator of the UK coronavirus testing programme.

Prof Martin Hibberd, Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said:

“It was good to hear the announcement of a number of important initiatives today. It looks like these can join up together to be greater than their individual parts, to create a much more effective programme to control this outbreak. I was particularly pleased to see the test, track and trace initiative, which mirrors the ‘contact tracing, test and quarantine’ that has been so effective in other countries.  With the number of transmissions per person (the “Ro”) coming down because of the social distancing policy, this initiative, when active, is likely to help significantly. It may also help in the lifting of some of the social distancing measures (as long as Ro remains low). However, for this to be most effective,  it may be that key staff need to be regularly tested and not to wait for symptoms to develop. This would catch people without symptoms, who are likely important transmitters of the virus and contact trace more rapidly. I hope the government can build up the level of testing to allow this to become routine.

“It was interesting to see the active research to detect and understand the immune response to the virus through the mass antibody survey. This highlights the dilemma of not knowing how protected and for how long, people recovering from the infection are. Further information and research is required to help us understand how we should be interpreting these results. However, we can be confident that for people with detectable antibody, they are most likely protected for at least a short while and this information could be useful if widely available.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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