Thursday, 23 April 2020

An A to Z Coronavirus observational guide. . . T


T

Testing


One of the big issues that keeps coming up in Britain is testing folk for Covid-19. The government seem to be missing their own goals on testing people and as a result then get quite a lot of hassle from the media. As far as I can tell this is to some degree the government’s own fault. Had they early on said there were going to be problems in testing large numbers of people, in particular front line health workers such as nurses and doctors them maybe they would be under less pressure.  I think they failed to realise that the worldwide demand for tests was so high that they suddenly found themselves at the back of the queue. They also said they were hoping to have a test to show who had built up antibody immunity and have paid for three million tests. It was to be the way to get everyone back to work quickly. The problem though is that this test has turned out to be unreliable when it itself was tested. So it sort of scuppered the government’s plans forcing them to fall back on the same test as used by the vast majority of the rest of the world.

Anyway the result of all this is the number of tests on people to see if they have Covid-19 in the UK is low compared to many other countries. And it appears that the countries that manage to undertake high levels of testing are also the ones that have the lowest numbers of Covid-19 cases and in turn lower numbers of deaths. It has been speculated by some that the UK’s number of deaths could possibly end up the highest in Europe. If this proves to be true then it may well be the government who will be blamed by both the media and public . . . . . We will see.





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