Testing
We are at last at the stage where anyone with symptoms can get a test.
Turnaround times for drive-in tests seem good from what I am reading, but not so much for the home tests. DD recently requested a test on a Saturday. It arrived on the Tuesday, was picked up by courier on Wednesday and her results came late Friday evening. Thankfully it was negative because otherwise any contacts she had infected would already have been wandering around for a week, even before however long it takes for contact tracing to alert them. She alerted those she knew of straight away but none of them could stay off work and quarantine until officially identified as a contact of a confirmed case. She works in a busy pharmacy and relies on public transport to get there.
This system won't work if it takes a week to get test results.
I also question how effective home testing kits are because it's not easy swabbing your own throat and nostrils. DD's test came with a big multi-page booklet of really quite complex instructions which would be difficult for a lot of people to follow correctly.
We know this virus spreads rapidly in poorer communities and urban communities - exactly the people least likely to have a car and so be able to use a drive-in centre.
We need to rethink home testing. It would be much better, simpler and quicker if someone came to your home and just swabbed you on the doorstep.
Isolation
Seven days isolation for people with symptoms is inadequate. Mild cases can remain infectious for 8-9 days and moderate and severe cases for much longer. They haven't found the upper limit yet for severe cases. WHO recommend 14 days isolation or 3 days after symptoms end, whichever is the longest. CDC have revised their isolation period from 7 days to 10 days.
Isolating at home with the rest of your household should be a last resort. We need to break the chains of transmission within households as well as outside. Not everyone would be able to isolate away from their family or housemates but it should be an option for everyone and it should be encouraged wherever possible.
We could use some of the empty hotels for this, which could save them from bankruptcy, and we could also refit the nightingales to be comfortable places for people to isolate, especially for those on the most unwell end of 'mild'.
The added advantage of having people isolate in community settings is that it's easier to monitor their health and catch them if they start deteriorating. This might help make our death rate less shit.
We also need to make sure that everyone can afford to isolate and for many, SSP is not sufficient. Nobody should end up with rent arrears or be unable to afford food or power because they have to isolate. As we wind down furlough we should be spending just a little bit more in a much more targeted way to make this system work. Nobody should be left behind, including those who have no recourse to public funds, those who fail the habitual residence test and those with irregular immigration status.
Contact tracing
Honestly, I don't believe our system will ever be 'world beating' because our government has squandered so much public trust and effective contact tracing requires a lot of public trust, whether we have an app or not.
Whether the data is gathered from an app or from humans, people need to know that their data is being properly protected. Otherwise they just won't comply. Now is not the time for the government to be building centralised databases or proposing to hold our data for 20 years on the off chance it might be useful.
Quarantining contacts
We don't seem to be bothering much about this. The contact tracing system is measuring its success by the number of contacts that are contacted and asked to isolate but we don't know how many of them actually do. Probably not many, given the growing pressure on people to get back to work.
Again, people are told to isolate at home with the rest of their household and that batshit diagram is still up, telling people they only need to stay at home for 14 days after the first member of their household becomes ill. If you catch it from your unwell household member you can actually leave quicker because the 14 days isolation is then cut to 7 days. The virus could be raging through your whole household, with the last person except you catching it on day 13, and you are still able to come out of isolation on day 14, go to the shops, get on a tube, go to work.
Again, we should be making it possible for contacts to properly quarantine away from their households, wherever possible. Why aren't we using hotels, holiday parks etc.? Again, we need to make sure everyone can afford to quarantine and SSP is not going to cut it for lots of pople, especially as people might need to quarantine more than once.
Probably we also need employment legislation to protect people from being dismissed if they need to quarantine, from day 1 of employment and not after 2 years when most protections kick in.
I'm not saying all this to have a pop at the government for past mistakes. I'm saying this because we all desperately need lockdown measures to ease and end, and this is what we need to do to prevent a second wave. Our case numbers appear to have been at a plateau for a while. Hospital admissions now also appear to be at a plateau. The sooner we can drive infections right down the sooner we can all get back to normal.
I'm not an expert, I've just been watching the WHO press briefings since the beginning of March and noticing the glaring differences between their advice (and what successful countries have been doing), and what our own government are doing.