Tony Blair today warned the UK is ‘running out of time’ to roll out a mass coronavirus testing programme as he said a second wave of the disease would force ministers to choose between the economy and people’s lives.
The former prime minister has long advocated routine testing of the whole population – even people without symptoms – as the only way to get life back to normal.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock confirmed this morning that the Government does now intend to move towards mass testing but he refused to set a date for when the programme will be operational.
Mr Blair said the system needs to be put in place as soon as possible amid fears of a second spike in infections in the autumn and winter months.
The former Labour leader said he believed it is ‘very hard to see how you go back into lockdown’ if there is a resurgence in case numbers.
He said in those circumstances the Government will face ‘absolutely impossible choices between locking down with all of the damage that does and keeping open with the possibility of the disease spreading even further’.
Mr Blair said mass testing would give people ‘confidence’ that it is safe to go back to work as he warned of the ‘consequential damage’ being done to businesses by people continuing to work from home.
Tony Blair warned this morning that the Government is ‘running out of time’ to introduce a mass coronavirus testing programme
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said this warning that the Government is pursuing a mass testing programme but refused to set a date for when it will be operational
The Government is urging people to go back to their desks but Mr Blair suggested such direction is pointless if workers do not feel safe.
He told Sky News: ‘You can say to people go back into work but if they don’t feel safe then they are going to be reluctant and if you want to reopen schools, universities, workplaces, if you want international travel to function again, the only way I think you can do that is by doing testing at scale and that is why we have got to move to this.’
He continued: ‘We are running out of time and that is why it is very urgent. To be fair to the Government, it is not that they have been doing nothing.
‘We have got the capacity now to test about 340,000 people a day. But actually we are only using around about 170,000 of that capacity so we are only using about half the testing capacity we have now.’
Mr Blair said it was vital that a mass testing programme is established as quickly as possible.
‘The risk is as you get into the autumn and the winter and the weather gets colder, the days get shorter, the nights get longer, if you were to have a resurgence of the disease, maybe you won’t, but if you were to, I think it is very hard to see how you go back into lockdown or at least without really catastrophic economic damage,’ he said.
‘Already the damage from this is pretty terrifying in my view and if you can’t therefore by the time you get to when that resurgence may happen, if you haven’t got the right containment infrastructure in place at that moment, then your risk is yes, you end up with a second wave and you are faced with some absolutely impossible choices between locking down with all of the damage that does and keeping open with the possibility of the disease spreading even further.’
Mr Blair said he had recently spoken to someone who works in the City of London at a firm with more than 300 employees where only eight members of staff have returned to the office.
He said: ‘That is your problem. If you think of the consequential damage that does to all the other businesses who are dependent on those people being in those places, when you stack all of this up if you want to give people the confidence, not just the permission, but the confidence I just don’t see how you do that unless you do the testing at the scale that we have said.’
Mr Hancock said this morning that moving towards a mass testing programme is a ‘really, really important drive that we have across government’.
But he refused to set a date for when the programme will be up and running, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘We will ramp it up certainly over the remainder of this year. We will start immediately. You will have heard last week that we announced contracts with two of these new technologies.
‘The point is, just to explain why this matters, that these new technologies, some of them you only have to use saliva rather than having a swab all the way down the back of your throat which means that anybody can administer it or self administer it much easier.
‘Some of them they don’t need a lab on the test which means you don’t have to send it off and get it back – with the best ones you get the results in 10 minutes.
‘We are testing some of these right now in Porton Down in our scientific labs and the mass testing, population testing, where we make it the norm that people get tested regularly, allowing us therefore to allow some of the freedoms back is a huge project in government right now.’
He added: ‘I have said very clearly that we are ramping it up over the remainder of this year. I am not going to put a firm deadline on it.’
He described rapid mass testing as a ‘moonshot’ and said it would allow ministers to ‘reopen all sorts of things’.