Covid-19 Update Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department of Health and Social Care
Lord Bilimoria
Main Page: Lord Bilimoria (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Bilimoria's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
The noble Baroness raises a very difficult subject. A huge amount of work has gone on in this country and others to define the most effective possible list of symptoms. The honest truth is that this disease manifests itself in different people in a great many different ways, and we have done a huge amount to try to understand the list of symptoms to be described in a way that will capture the greatest number of people in the clearest way possible. We keep that under review, but the work that has gone into it could not have been more thorough.
Lord Bilimoria (CB) [V]
My Lords, a programme of nationwide mass testing is exactly the ambition we will need to build confidence in the public and businesses before a vaccine becomes available. Professor Devi Sridhar of Edinburgh University says that the only safe way is mass testing. I agree with the Minister: look at where we were in March, with 2,000 tests a day, and now we have the capacity for well over 300,000 tests. Given that, why can we not get on with instant mass testing? The Abbott BinaxNOW test laboratory in America is producing antigen tests—10 million this month and 50 million next month—that give results within 20 minutes, and they are already FDA-approved. Why can we not do that at such speed? Can we get this into the market quickly? Likewise, Germany started testing at airports in June, and France did so in August. Why can we not start testing at airports quickly? Jobs, the economy and lives are at stake.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, we could not be moving more quickly to engage with the producers of tests in order to sign up the resources we need to put in mass testing. That cannot be switched on overnight, but we could not be moving more quickly. On airport testing, the CMO has been crystal clear: he is deeply concerned about day-zero testing and about any but the most thorough airport testing measures. We were caught out on this at the beginning of the epidemic and we remain extremely cautious.