Covid-19: Response

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell [V]]

The noble Baroness invites speculation; I wish that I knew the precise answer to that key question. We are extremely vigilant in a large number of areas, including the measures to release a degree of social distancing and on foreign travel, as she knows. We know that if the country remains committed to the basic principles—hand washing and hygiene; social distance; and isolation when necessary—those three principal pillars will be the ones that defend us from the spread of the disease. We are doing everything we can to shore up those pillars, and that is particularly true in social care, where we have massively boosted testing for both staff and patients and brought in hygiene control, particularly around PPE. We will continue to support the sector financially to ensure that agency workers can be used as little as possible.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]]

My Lords, there are still issues about the length of time it takes for test results to be returned and contacts traced. Is the Minister aware that a four-week pilot scheme for the OptiGene saliva test in Southampton was completed a week ago? This test takes only 20 minutes to process. Since it does not rely on throat and nose swabs, there are less likely to be false negatives because of faulty swabbing. Can the Minister give the House the results of the pilot, which was referred to by a witness to the Science and Technology Committee as a potential game-changer? Are there plans to make the new test more widely available? In light of the latest news about travellers from Spain, will the test be given at the airport to all passengers returning from non-exempt countries so that they can be followed up quickly at the address they have given on the passenger locator form, and should they not have another test a few days later?

[Lord Bethell [V]]

My Lords, I pay tribute to colleagues at Southampton, who have been managing this exciting trial of saliva-based LAMP testing. The LAMP process is extremely exciting, as it removes the time-consuming RNA extraction process from the testing; turnaround times are therefore dramatically reduced. Saliva is a much more accessible vector for the virus than swabbing and therefore has potential for mass appeal. We are extremely interested in the pilot of the OptiGene technology. It is, though, at an early stage. I would not want to raise expectations too quickly on this, but it remains one of a great many similar exciting technologies that our innovations and partnership team is looking at. I am extremely optimistic about the speed and scale of innovation in our test and trace programme, and I believe that we can move more quickly, at bigger scale and with more accuracy than we ever have before in the very near term.