The government has placed a lot of hope in its test and trace system, but even disregarding teething problems with the smartphone app and reports of some of the 25,000 contact tracers being left idle, is it even possible for it to achieve its objective? The problem with Covid-19 all along, and the reason it has managed to evade the efforts of containment which had worked with previous novel viruses such as SARS and avian flu, is the sheer number of people who seem to be infected but who show no symptoms. Some studies have shown that 80 percent of cases might fall into this category. Worse, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that these asymptomatic individuals are capable of passing the infection to others. Short of testing the entire population every few days, just how can anyone attempt track and trace cases of the disease when we have no idea who is infected?
A team from the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, has now attempted to quantify this problem.
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