I wonder how many of us have Coronavirus/COVID-19 with mild symptoms or do not even realise we had it? Who can tell right now? We just do not know.
From the media I gather that in a village in Northern Italy which was largely infected with Coronavirus, between 50 – 75 per cent of those who tested positive for COVID-19 exhibited no symptoms at all and did not feel unwell either. Apparently all 3,000 inhabitants of Vo’Euganeo were tested. They did not believe they were infected but indeed they were.
Ross Clark writing in the latest edition of the Spectator suggests that 130 of the 166 people most recently tested in China and found to have COVID-19 have had no symptoms whatsoever. I do not truly trust Chinese statistic but nonetheless this is interesting.
Comparatively few people in the UK have been tested for Coronavirus and even those that are highly likely to have the illness are not necessarily checked unless they show severe symptoms, which might beg the question as to why test them then?
The government is right that rapidly expanding this antibody testing capacity is essential to give us a way out of this pandemic crisis. We must use the great expertise we have in our world leading universities and life science industry research laboratories in a network to maximise the availability of a validated test as rapidly as possible.
Six days ago, the BBC carried a report about the work of Professor Sunetra Gupta, who leads an Oxford University team modelling the COVID-19 virus. Professor Gupta suggested that it was possible that up to half of the British population may have been infected and that the disease reached the UK by mid-January.
But as I started this piece by saying, who knows right now? There is only one way to find out and that is using polling sample-type methodology. We should test a random selection of people from right across society to see if they have Coronavirus.
On Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday Matt Hancock suggested that Porton Down (photograph) had facilities to deal with 500 very high-quality antibody tests a day.
Maybe we should use this capacity to ascertain using polling type samples of people just what percentage of us are likely to have or have had Coronavirus but don’t know it? We could also use this tested sample to answer the other crucial query which is does infection give us immunity from a repeat infection, which we fervently hope will be the case.
We don’t know the answer to either of those questions but I hope the Government is urgently finding out. The replies could make a huge difference as to how we exit from our current state of lock-down.