The government’s £12 billion test and trace system has been described by its scientific advisory committee Sage as making a ‘marginal’ difference to the transmission of Covid-19. This is not least because test results are taking a long time to arrive — of tests conducted at testing centres in the week to 21 October, only 47 per cent of results were returned the next day. For home test kits, just 32 per cent of results came back within 48 hours. In the same week, test and trace only managed to make contact with 60 per cent of contacts reported to it.
But there is another factor that is central to understanding test and trace’s effectiveness which remains obscure: just how likely are we to catch Covid-19 from a close contact anyway? A study by the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore, and published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, seeks to answer this question.
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