Opinion: First wave vs Second wave, will our test and trace prevent another lockdown?

153 days.

If you’re lucky enough to live in one of the areas of the UK that hasn’t had local lockdown restrictions, that’s how many days it’s been since the first lockdown’s grip on our day to day lives began to ease.

On the May 10th, Boris Johnson addressed the United Kingdom and laid out a plan to begin reopening the country.

To many I’ve talked to, the first lockdown either feels like yesterday or a distant memory. Many don’t even remember the measures he announced but we do remember being restricted to one form of outdoor exercise a day.

1: Chansom Pantip/Shutterstock.com

Despite the intense restrictions, Lockdown was the only way to decrease the Covid-19 pandemic.

After 12 weeks of lockdown, Boris Johnson announced there would be a phased lifting of restrictions, explaining why we couldn’t have complete freedom all at once.

“We must make sure that any measures we take do not force the reproduction rate of the disease, the R, back up over one so that we have the kind of exponential growth we were facing a few weeks ago.”

In Johnson’s address to the nation, he mentioned a second wave, but I think we were all too busy focusing on getting out of the first wave to think about the potential danger of a spike in the virus.

Boris Johnson was desperate in pleading for our concentration and effort to prevent the second wave as the NHS would be put under more strain and the need for testing would skyrocket when the common cold surfaces as the temperatures drop, causing confusion between the symptoms of a cold or the Corona Virus.

As the days grow colder, COVID-19 cases are spiking and we’ve seen further restrictions being prepared and put into place.

So, what has the Government done to prepare for us for the second wave?

2: Graph showing UK's total coronavirus cases over time. Graph owned by Worldometer

Boris Johnson announced that testing and tracing would help combat the crisis we have come to know as Covid-19:

“If we are to control this virus then we must have a world-beating system for testing potential victims and for tracing their contacts so that all told, we’re testing literally hundreds of thousands of people every day.”

Test and Trace was to be the key difference in battling the increase of Covid-19. Still without a vaccine, the Government believed it was the only way to decrease cases.

South Korea were already beginning to employ the system to keep their numbers in check and other countries had their own method of doing so. After the World Health Organisation said to “test, test, test” the next step was to trace and isolate, as to avoid locking down uninfected people.

Just over a week after Johnson’s address, the government announced that a “world-beating” Test and Trace system was in development. Within another two weeks, the operation had begun. The timeline for this operation was understandable but the results were not.

Dido Harding, the House of Lords member who is the executive chair of NHS Test and Trace, said to MPs that the ability for councils to utilise the results of test and trace would be in place by the end of June. On top of this delay, The NHS app was also missing; a vital piece of the app.

3: Dido Harding heads up the Test and Trace scheme. twitter.com/didoharding

Some medical experts put this down on the reliance that the Test and Trace operation has on the private sector and its various supply chains (routes) it uses. In an interview with Richard Vize for the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the president of the Institute of Biomedical Science Allan Wilson said “We’ve always argued that the testing would be better done locally because the infrastructure exists already, so why invent another route? The government decided early on that their preference was to develop separate labs. I think it was a political rather than a clinical decision.”

By the end of June, the Test and Trace was still failing to contact just over a quarter of people, even though the government had months to improve it.

After months of delays the NHS Covid-19 app was released on September 24th in England and Wales, September 10th in Scotland and July 30th in Northern Ireland. So, after a rocky start, is the Government’s system ready for what comes next?

The statistics show an uneasy answer. Between the 9th and the 16th of September, only 28% of swab tests were received within 24 hours, less than a third the week before, with the average time for turnaround being 2-3 days On top of this, the percentage of those contacted by the system seems to be slipping. In July and August, it stayed around 72% but in the month of September, it fell from 74% to 68%.

4: Sir Patrick Vallance and Professor Chris Whitty warned of an exponential spike. Image owned by Crown Copyright, www.gov.uk

This “World-beating” system hasn’t done enough to stop the second wave as the number of local lockdowns across the country continue to increase and the number of Covid-19 cases rise exponentially.

The race to beat COVID-19 is difficult. The Government ask the public to endure the restrictions they enforce but as the Government sprint frantically to keep up with the Virus, it’s becoming difficult to see any progress they are making during the second wave of the Corona Virus.

Another national lockdown would prove that the government failed to prepare adequately for the second wave. The lockdown was the only effective tool in bringing cases down during this pandemic.

After the set back with the Governments ‘Test and Trace’ app, the United Kingdom fall behind other countries in handling the pandemic and keeping the spike of Corona-virus cases down.

The Government must develop a better system in testing potential victims for Covid-19 in order to avoid the imminent nature of being the first European country to go into a second lockdown.