"I was watching Dr H speaking a few days ago. He actually said when it's rampant in society and general circulation testing and tracing becomes less necessary. Basically hinted at pointless."
Directly contradicts the German experience in March-April:
Deaths here were so low, because cases were kept as low as possible
Serology studies confirmed that there were significantly fewer infections here
The main reason for low cases was of course Merkel's very early lockdown
However what also was a major factor was the extensive testing, track & trace systems
- the original 20,000 of permanent local public / environmental health officers were massively boosted by bringing in local civil service officers of all unrelated specialities (e.g. transport) and then thousands of Uni students
As cases rocketed, the public health authorities said they could not keep up with t&t and at peak estimated they were probably only able to find 1/10 of contacts,
but they concentrated on possible superspreader events - care homes, hospitals, large workplaces etc during lockldown - and also people\ with more serious symptoms, who were likely to have shed more virus.
Despite missing a lot of contacts, they still kept down the number of cases and hence deaths
PHE gave up on t&t in March because of lack of manpower & test capcity - later evidence to the HoC was that they only had capacity to trace about 50 cases
Hence the spin at one time that it was only necessary for "developing countries"