Covid-19: Testing Debate
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Lord Patel
Main Page: Lord Patel (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Patel's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Bethell
My noble friend Lady Rawlings is entirely right: we all have an important role to play. There is good evidence that personal tracing by individuals of contacts within their networks has a powerful role to play in isolating those who might have been in contact with the virus. Defeating this virus will be the responsibility of everyone in the community; we cannot rely just on digital apps and central databases.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, what evidence do the Government use to calculate the value of R0?
Lord Bethell
The noble Lord will know that we have set up one of the most ambitious surveys, conducted by the ONS, to study on a weekly basis a large number of viral and serological tests. Those are used by statisticians to understand both the prevalence and the spread of the disease. Figures for that are emerging—we now have three weeks-worth of figures. They are being published regularly and I would be glad to send the noble Lord a link to the relevant data.