Covid-19 Update

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Thursday 4th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her insightful question about the obscure but vital question of data architecture. If there is going to be one powerful legacy of this awful disease, it will be the way in which data helped drive medical research, medical insight and the treatment of individuals. I am not sure if we need a new registry, a national Covid registry; what we need is for our existing data to be able to talk to itself. I can tell the Chamber that we are making enormous progress on that. I pay tribute to the unsung heroes, the CTOs who meet weekly at the NHS data architecture meeting, an obscure but vital forum where an enormous amount of good work is done by NHSX, NHSD, test and trace and others in primary and secondary care who are working incredibly hard, so that if one takes a test today, it goes into one’s patient record tomorrow and can be used the day after by a researcher looking at long Covid, dexamethasone, recovery or whatever. This is how modern healthcare should work. We have not done it well enough to date. We are making great progress on it tomorrow and we must not stop.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, like everyone else, I could not agree more that the NHS rollout has been absolutely brilliant. I should also say that the Minister has been resilient, and we all appreciate that. However, I return to what is a more uncomfortable subject, I suspect, and follow up the question on airport testing. The Minister said that far fewer people are travelling and that the pursuit of quarantine conditions is more effective than it was. Given that fewer people are travelling, is it not possible to do what my noble friend Lord Winston suggested and pursue those people through test and trace and airport testing, as many other countries are doing successfully? How can the Minister say that quarantine testing of people in self-isolation is more effective? Can he give us more details on that?

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for her questions. Perhaps I may tackle the specific question of airport testing, which has been raised a couple of times. The honest truth is that the arrival of families in south Gloucestershire and Aberdeen who had done a pre-flight test and subsequently developed symptoms demonstrates, I am afraid, that pre-flight and airport testing is not as effective as one would hope. If it were, we would not have to impose a 10-day testing regime with tests on the second and eighth days. That is the only rigorous way in which one can do it. It is estimated that airport testing catches perhaps between 10% and 20% of infection, and that is why managed quarantine is so important. The infection rate among those who arrive in the UK is high enough for us to be seriously concerned and to impose the kind of isolation that we have done. Until that infection rate is reduced, I am afraid that we have to look forward to managed quarantine and isolation being a part of the travel experience for some time.