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Everyone should be tested for coronavirus every month to give people “freedom passes” to resume everyday activities, Jeremy Hunt says. The former health secretary today urges Boris Johnson
to set an Easter deadline to return to more normal life through mass testing with rapid home testing kits, even if vaccines have not come through by then. Pilot schemes in Liverpool are
offering tests to anyone who wants one but Mr Hunt, who chairs the Commons health select committee, urges the government to go further and give people an incentive to be tested by allowing
them “to go out, shop and go to work” if they test negative. Mr Hunt has long been an advocate of testing and has persuaded ministers to introduce weekly testing for all frontline NHS staff.
He says that the same approach should be extended by using new lateral flow kits to test everyone in the country, an idea that ministers have considered but have been reluctant to speak
publicly about. He points out that the present testing regime picks up — and gives NHS Test and Trace details of — only about half the number of new cases that the Office for National
Statistics’ separate, anonymous survey suggests are present. Advertisement “Monthly testing of the entire population is now within our grasp — something every bit as significant as the
arrival of vaccines,” Mr Hunt writes_._ Although he concedes this could require 65,000 testing centres and half a million staff, he points to examples in China and Slovakia to show millions
of people can be tested quickly. While vaccines still await regulatory approval and in some cases key safety and efficacy data, mass testing is primarily a logistical task, Mr Hunt argues.
Compulsory mass testing could cut cases by 85 per cent, he says, by spotting infectious people who did not come forward for routine testing, estimating this could decrease daily numbers from
23,000 to 3,000 a day. While accepting that the Test and Trace programme has done well to expand lab capacity and bring in lateral flow tests, Mr Hunt is more critical of the contact
tracing element, calling for it to be handed over to local councils. He wants people compensated in full for earnings lost through self-isolation to improve compliance, which is below 20 per
cent for the full 14 days. So far ministers have offered £500 grants. Advertisement Mr Hunt says: “We should go further, offering people who comply with testing and isolation requirements a
‘freedom pass’ that removes the requirement to follow lockdown regulations.” In Slovakia, where 3.6 million people were tested in a weekend, people who proved negative were given “a
certificate that released them from curfew and allowed them to go out, shop and go to work. This meant 97 per cent of the eligible population was tested,” Mr Hunt says. “We should do the
same in the UK, using the NHS Covid app to record who has been tested and who has received the vaccine.” He writes that such mass testing “would mean we could set a date — perhaps as soon as
Easter — when it would be possible to return to some kind of normality”. It came as the troubled Test and Trace scheme struggled to reach 40 per cent of the contacts of those confirmed as
having Covid-19. Bosses at the service accepted that they needed to “rebuild public trust” and plan a pre-Christmas campaign. In an internal slide presentation seen by Sky News, senior
executives talk of the need to “reset” their relationship with local councils, who have been demanding more control of testing and tracing.