At last something sensible from Public Health England – Owl

An army of thousands of coronavirus contact tracers is to be trained within weeks to help Britain to exit lockdown.

Council staff and civil servants are among those who will be drafted in as part of a three-tier system to ensure that every infected person is isolated before they pass the virus on to others.

JESSICA TAYLOR http://www.thetimes.co.uk

Public Health England aims to have a system running within three weeks so that it can be used if the government wants to ease restrictions.

As he declared yesterday that Britain had “reached the peak” of coronavirus cases, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, promised “very large scale” contact tracing would be in place to allow social distancing to be relaxed.

Asian countries such as South Korea and Singapore have kept outbreaks under control and minimised deaths through intensive tracing of the movements of those shown to be infected, with those who have come into close contact ordered to self-isolate.

Britain abandoned mass contact tracing a month ago as testing capacity failed to keep up with the epidemic.

The aim would be to track more than 80 per cent of people with whom an infected person had been in contact within 24 hours of diagnosis. Infected people and those they had contact with would be quarantined until the risk that they could get the illness had passed.

The plan emerged as:

• The chief medical officer warned that some social distancing would last the rest of the year and the World Health Organisation said that “the virus will be with us for a long time”.
• A national “antibody census” will test 300,000 people over the next year to build up a picture of how the virus has spread through Britain.
• The NHS will “reopen” for routine care now that it has spare beds, amid warnings that 60,000 cancer patients could die.
• Hospitals have been admonished for stockpiling supplies as it was revealed that the NHS needs up to 60 million masks a week for frontline workers.
• Parliament hosted the first partly virtual prime minister’s questions in a sitting largely free of technical glitches.

Mr Hancock told MPs: “As we bring the number of new cases down so we will introduce contact tracing at large scale . . . Our goal is to get to a point where we can test, track and trace everybody who needs it.”

Officials are confident that Britain will have the capacity to test 100,000 people a day by the end of next week and believe this will be enough to introduce a national contact tracing scheme, pointing out that South Korea operates one on 20,000 tests a day.

They acknowledge that it will require a huge workforce and that setting one up is crucial. A Cabinet Office official said that the plan was to have the scheme running before May 7, when ministers must review the lockdown. “We cannot announce any easing of the lockdown until we know that testing and contact tracing is working effectively,” they said.

“This is why we need to have the capacity for 100,000 tests by the end of the month because even if we are not using them now we will need them at that point.”

The WHO said that countries wanting to exit lockdown must “find every case” and “trace and quarantine every contact”. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, pressed Mr Hancock to commit the government to having a scheme in place within two weeks. Mr Hancock replied: “We are ramping up our testing capacity and our capacity for contact tracing in a matter of weeks, and we’ll have it ready to make sure that we can use that as and when the incidence of transmission comes down.”

The NHS is developing a smartphone app that logs contact through Bluetooth. However, Allyson Pollock, a professor at Newcastle University, insisted that “we don’t need fancy expensive apps”, telling the BBC that even San Francisco was deploying a “low-tech model using people and telephones”. She estimated that training courses for volunteers, teachers or students could be done in a few days.

The Times understands that the government’s contact tracing plan envisages three levels of tracing. As well as the app, a second tier of temporary contact tracers is also planned, with officials finalising the numbers needed. Estimates have centred on about 15,000.

Public officials whose normal duties have been suspended are likely to be given basic training. Council environmental health officers are likely to be among those used. Volunteers who have come forward to help the NHS are also being considered.

A top tier made up of Public Health England’s most experienced staff will be reserved for tracing outbreaks in hospitals, care homes and other settings where lives are at immediate risk.