Never mind 100,000 – should we be aiming for 10 million tests a day?

My friend ‘D’ is an instantly recognisable type in the Middle East: the middleman. He’s always chasing the next deal, always about to make millions. One scheme was to build a London Eye in a flyblown town in the Levant. Another was to buy a ‘Trump sex tape’ for $10 million. He invited me to watch the negotiations. They ended with a sociopathic Russian gangster ringing up in the night threatening to kill my children. ‘We know where you live.’ His latest scheme is to get the British government to buy coronavirus test kits from Turkey. This could be the big score: for biotech companies, testing is a new goldrush. And though there’s a touch of Del Boy about my friend, he’s right about the need for test kits. In fact, to get out of the crisis caused by the coronavirus, we might have to test on an immense, unprecedented, almost unimaginable scale.

As ‘D’ will be overjoyed to learn, 34 experts have written a joint letter to the government saying that every single person in Britain should be tested once a week. That’s ten million tests a day. The 34 experts are mostly professors of epidemiology or public health; there’s also a Nobel prize-winner in economics. They’re calling not just for mass testing but for universal testing. That’s never been done before in a large country like the UK. Their letter was published by the Lancet and the authors argue that without universal testing and selective quarantine, Britain will be stuck in a cycle of relaxing and then reimposing the lockdown, with fresh surges in the epidemic each time: ‘These cycles will kill tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people before a vaccine becomes available.’