Test and Trace Is A Diversion

The media is full of the story about the latest fiasco over test and trace, with the government's system having misplaced thousands of positive test results. The opposition, and those that have been pressing the government to implement even harsher lockdowns with the attendant evisceration of civil liberties, and devastating effects on the economy and workers' livelihoods, have seen another opportunity to attack the government opportunistically, whilst diverting attention away from the devastating effects their own promotion of lockdowns have had, and the fact that, in terms of stopping the virus, they have been completely useless if not counter-productive. But, all of this emphasis on the failure of the government's test and trace scheme, and implication that all would be well if only the government could implement such a scheme effectively, is a complete diversion. It simply repeats the errors of the lockdown but in a different way. 

The emphasis in the criticism of the government scheme has been the way it was implemented incompetently, leaving several thousand people who had tested positive out of statistics, and failing to pass on this information for the purpose of tracing those they had been in contact with. This amounted to about 15,000 people. But, in the grand scheme of things, this is chicken feed. The reality is that only a small minority of people are ever tested for COVID to begin with. Take out those that have to be tested several times, and the actual number of people tested is even smaller. Of those tested, even setting aside the current problems, about 30% of people who are positive show up as negative, because they do not have the virus in their nasal cavity or throat, which is where the samples are taken. But, even this is only a small part of the number of people who have the virus, but who never get into the actual figure of infections. 

Around 80% of people who are infected are asymptomatic, or have only mild cold-like symptoms. In other words, this is the same 80% of the population that are not at serious risk from the virus, essentially those under 60. So, if you are in this group, why would you ever get tested, unless you have to. But, more than that. Even amongst the 20% of the population at serious risk, i.e. those over 60, only a very small proportion of them, who contract the virus, actually develop serious symptoms, and even smaller proportion require intensive care, with many of those who do also dying. So, even of those in this 20% who become infected, only a small proportion will become ill enough to seek out testing. In short, the number of people who are tested and found to be positive, comprise around only 10% of the actual number of people who, at any one time, have been infected. If the official figures for new infections are around 10,000, the actual number of new infections is around 100,000, and 90,000 of those new infections are never detected or recorded, and so all of those individuals then spread the virus amongst the population. 

That is why test and trace is never going to work. It would require that you test every single person, and even then it would miss people, because someone who is tested, may contract the virus an hour after they have been tested. So, to cover that you would have to test every single person, every single day, which is an impossibility. The only time that test and trace worked was in small countries with easily managed borders, where they could catch an initial small number of infected people, and prevent them spreading the virus. But, they too couldn't maintain that regime indefinitely, any more than lockdowns can be maintained indefinitely, and so, as with lockdowns, wherever, the test and trace regulations were relaxed, the virus once again began to flare up. And that is necessarily the case, because neither test and trace nor lockdowns do anything to kill the virus or to build up the required herd immunity that would effectively prevent its spread, and so kill it. In fact, they slow the development of herd immunity and so make matters worse. 

Once again, this shows the extent to which concentration on the number of infections, which is a meaningless metric, has got in the way of concentrating on the real issue, which is the number of hospital admissions and deaths. The latter can only be reduced by ensuring that those actually at serious risk from the virus are isolated from it, but that is precisely the course of action that governments and others have resisted in favour of lockdowns, test and trace and other such ineffective measures. 

The consequence is that a hullabaloo is made over things that really are unimportant. SNP MP Margaret Ferrier has run into a storm, because she caught a train, and went into parliament having tested positive for COVID. The Tories have been somewhat constrained in their outrage, because its little different to what Dominic Cummings did. Ferrier should not have been surprised at the furore, which shows a particular lack of political awareness, unless, of course, she wanted to provoke such a response. Yet, the actions of Ferrier, in a rational world would have provoked no such response. Ferrier is not one of those in the at risk category. She was not ill, and so there was no reason why she should restrict her activities any more than if she had, any other year had a cold. The argument against her is that she risked transmitting the virus to others. But, so what? Every year, millions of people transmit the coronavirus or the flu virus to others via such action, when they are suffering from a cold or flu. 

Significant numbers of people who contract the flu or the common cold, also die each year, but we do not insist that those with colds and flu confine themselves, we do not close down the economy to prevent transmission of these viruses. With coronavirus, we know that it almost exclusively targets the elderly – those over 80 specifically, but also those over 60 – so the obvious course of action, rather than closing down society, or implementing ineffective and costly test and trace systems, is simply to protect/shield those elderly people against the virus, and thereby allow everyone else to get on with life as normal. If that approach was followed, there would have been no elderly or otherwise at risk people on the train that Ferrier took, nor in parliament etc. There would have been absolutely no issue, and anyone who then contracted the virus would have developed antibodies to it, helping to quickly develop herd immunity so that the virus could not spread, and reducing the time that the vulnerable in society needed to be shielded from it. 

If that approach had been followed then we would not have had tens of thousands of deaths of old people, most of whom were residents in care homes, or in hospital, because those institutions would have concentrated on ensuring that staff and visitors had proper PPE, that there were adequate isolation and contact protocols in place to prevent transmission of the virus to the old and vulnerable. But, a crazy concentration on preventing widespread infections amongst the majority of the population who were at no serious risk from the virus, meant that this necessary focus on shielding the elderly and vulnerable was not undertaken, and so care homes which should have been sanctuaries instead became killing fields. 

And, the truth is that, for the reasons set out above, every day, thousands of people, who have the virus, but who are asymptomatic, are travelling on trains, and in the process they already are passing on the virus to thousands of other people who are similarly asymptomatic, without anyone batting an eye, because they all remain blissfully unaware that this is happening. Its why the actual number of people who have had the virus, and now have antibodies or other forms of immunity is much larger than the official figures suggest is the case, which will only become obvious when we get large scale antibody testing, which is the only form of testing that has any useful purpose.