Covid-19: Testing

Lord Patel Excerpts
Thursday 14th May 2020

(3 years, 10 months ago)

Lords Chamber
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Lord Bethell Portrait Lord Bethell
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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 Portrait Lord Patel (CB)
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My Lords, what evidence do the Government use to calculate the value of R0?

Lord Bethell Portrait Lord Bethell
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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.