Covid-19: UK pledges to reintroduce contact tracing to fight virus
Gareth Iacobucci
Abstract
The government is to reintroduce contact tracing of people who have had symptoms of covid-19, England’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, said last week. Hancock told MPs on the health select committee that the planned increase in testing capacity (the government has promised to conduct 100 000 tests a day by the end of April) would enable it to restart a policy that it stopped in March when the prevalence of the virus began to increase in the UK. He said, “Community testing is part of the strategy, and we will be introducing it when we can. It wasn’t possible when we had small numbers of tests, but as we have expanding numbers of tests it will be possible.” Hancock said that a central team would be set up to implement the strategy, which includes an app for people to trace and report their contacts themselves, alongside more traditional methods such as using health professionals to proactively contact and trace people. “That [central team] brings together teams from NHSX, who are leading on the app, with a huge array of partners that are working within that, [and] from Public Health England, who are the experts on what we refer to as external contact tracing,” Hancock said. Hancock said the app …