The Adam Smith Institute has estimated 1.73 million people, including Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, have been pinged by Test and Trace and are subsequently isolating. This number could increase to 5.2 million by mid-August if the government doesn’t act. Guido didn’t realise this many people would be pinging on Freedom Day… 

“Pingdemic” has resulted in thousands of businesses, including Marks & Spencers and Iceland, shutting their doors and reducing operations due to large numbers of staff having to isolate. Maybe if everyone had the option of using a test and isolate scheme, businesses wouldn’t be suffering this much… 

Ministers, Tory backbenchers from the Covid Recovery Group, business representatives and Tony Blair are looking to bring forward the date that pinged, double-jabbed people no longer have to isolate. Without a change in policy, England could be looking at lockdown by the backdoor… 

Michael Gove had to abandon a meeting with the PM and the leaders of the UK’s devolved assemblies yesterday after being told by the track and trace app that he’d come into contact with a Covid-positive person. The app pinged him just days after returning home from his trip to Portugal to watch the Champions League final over the bank holiday. Quite the own goal…

According to Sky, Gove won’t be submitting himself to a 10-day self-isolation, as he’s taking part in a new pilot scheme, which involves being tested every day for a week.

Yesterday morning, Guido reported the finger was pointed at the 12,000 holiday-going football fans as being the cause of Portugal’s rise in cases. It’s awkward that Michael Gove – responsible for much of the UK’s Covid response – is now possibly partly responsible for Portugal’s 56% rise in cases…

Over ten million people have been tested at least once since the UK’s Test & Trace system launched – 15% of the country. As of yesterday 32,745,923 tests have been processed in the UK since the service began – almost two million of these taking place last week alone. The UK’s capacity is now the highest in Europe. Impressive, but not enough to change the game while infections are running at such a high rate…

If this week’s Liverpool rapid test pilot works out we can expect this total to skyrocket further. The new UK-produced “Lateral flow tests” that do not require lab processing are far cheaper to produce, faster to turn around, and cannot clog up the processing system in the way that the surge of demand did in September. For the testing regime to be truly successful, the percentage of the population being repeatedly tested will have to be significantly higher than it currently is… 

From Friday this week, Liverpool will become the first city in the UK to introduce rapid response regular mass testing. Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson told the Today Programme this morning that “we would envisage that teaching staff could be tested every week and pupils in secondary schools tested every week.” Hospitals, teaching establishments, and universities are to be among the settings that receive regular tests by default, contacts of infected people will also be asked to test, and other citizens will be able to go into testing centres if they choose to.

The new “lateral flow tests” allow results almost instantaneously without needing to be sent off to a laboratory – bringing results within around fifteen minutes. This means that not only will more people be tested, crucially people will not have to wait days to hear their results. Regular asymptomatic testing avoids the problem of people being asked to quarantine if they just, for example, passed someone in a shop. People are far more likely to quarantine if they can see they actually have the disease. It will also mean a far smaller number of people actually have to quarantine…

Government scientist Sir John Bell told the Today Programme this morning that the tests are both cheap and reliable. They have been kept relatively quiet since July in order to rigorously verify them. The tests have now been deemed 99.9% specific, meaning only one in a thousand tested would be a false positive.

As Boris said in the Commons yesterday, this rapid mass testing programme is being organised by the army and the tests are being made in the UK. If all goes well in Liverpool it could start to be rolled out across the UK by the end of lockdown 2, genuinely changing the game…

Despite stories of shortages when demand leapt up in September, one genuinely impressive element of the UK’s response to the pandemic is the testing system – even if its tracing counterpart leaves a lot to be desired. The UK, already conducting more tests than any other country in Europe, yesterday reached capacity for 480,961 tests to be carried out a day, up from 467,512 the day before. With two more days to go it is now a near certainty that capacity will reach 500,000-a-day by Saturday. Congratulations, though don’t stop there. Demand is soaring too…