The EconomistApril 4th 2020 Britain 21U
ntil recently, hospitals that could
test for covid-19 were instructed to save
their tests for patients and not to test staff.
That changed on March 27th. Over the fol-
lowing weekend, a small sample of tests
were carried out on nhsworkers. The re-
sults were explosive: only around one in
seven of those self-isolating actually had
the virus, which meant that many who had
been staying at home could in fact safely
work. Failure to test, thus, had greatly exac-
erbated the hospital staff shortage.
Until two weeks ago, the government’s
priority was not to contain the virus but to
protect the vulnerable, so testing was not
that important. But as the virus has spread,
so the need for more testing, especially of
health workers, has increased. Two weeks
ago, Boris Johnson promised that Britain
was “moving up to 25,000 [tests] a day” and
was aiming for 250,000 a day, but Britain is
still only carrying out around 10,000 a day.
Altogether, it has tested 153,000 people,
compared with 500,000 a week in Ger-
many. It lags most other rich countries too.
Exactly what has gone wrong is unclear.
Michael Gove, chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster, says there is a shortage of chem-
ical ingredients. According to Chris Hop-
son of nhsProviders, a membership orga-
nisation, with enough swabs and solution
the health service’s pathology laboratories
could carry out around 100,000 tests a day.
Others say that the problem lies not
with the supply of chemicals, which are
commonplace, but with the initial decision
to centralise work in a dozen laboratories
run by Public Health England (phe), a gov-
ernment agency. Greg Clark, chair of the
House of Commons science and technol-
ogy committee, has criticised this ap-
proach, arguing that more work could be
done in hospitals and universities.
Downing Street has since taken control
of the operation, on the grounds that phe
and the medical regulator, the normal
channel for approval, are too slow, and a
number of new labs are being set up to
ramp up testing swiftly; but a lack of com-
munication between Number 10 and phe
means a lot of confusion. “There are paral-
lel structures,” says Deenan Pillay, profes-
sor of virology at University College Lon-
don. “They don’t talk to each other.”
As the disease spreads through the pop-
ulation, another sort of testing will become
increasingly important: for antibodies,
whose presence shows whether someonehas ever had the virus. The government has
promised a test will arrive soon, but
Britons should not hold their breath.
Antibody testing is particularly suscep-
tible to false positives and false negatives,
so needs to be carefully validated. A bunch
of Chinese companies produce antibody
testing kits, and have been churning them
out. They are in high demand. The British
government is in negotiations to buy mil-
lions of them, but business sources say
that countries that demand less validation
data than Britain—such as Russia, Spain
and the Gulf states—have been snapping
them up. The swifter countries risk getting
dodgy tests; the slower ones risk getting
hold of kits too late. 7Number 10 has taken charge of testing
to try to ramp it up fasterTestingNegative result
B
ritons lovea chuckle at the expense of
puffed-up officials. The villain of “Dad’s
Army”, an air-raid warden, is forever in-
structing the residents of wartime Wal-
mington-on-Sea to “put that light out!” In a
famous sketch by Rowan Atkinson, a con-
stable charges a suspect with “walking
around with an offensive wife”.
The lockdown has provided satirists
with plenty of material. Cops have taken to
patrolling parks to break up gatherings and
tape off outdoor gyms, as if they were crime
scenes. Drivers are being questioned on
their reasons for leaving home. A police
force ticked off Stephen Kinnock, a Labour
mp, for visiting his parents, even though heonly went as far as the front garden. Bob-
bies in Derbyshire released a drone video of
visitors to the Peak District walking dogs
and taking photographs, activities they
deemed “not essential”. The force also dyed
a turquoise lake black (pictured) to deter
potential swimmers (a local official insists
that it does so every year).
Overzealous tactics have prompted
equally overblown reactions. Jonathan
Sumption, a retired Supreme Court judge,
pronounced the measures “disgraceful”.
“This is what a police state is like,” he said.
But many are uneasy about the enthusiasm
with which some officers have taken up
their new powers, which allow them to is-
sue fines of £60 for most gatherings of
more than two people in public or evading
the lockdown without good reason.
The problem is less the jackboot in-
stincts of the constabulary than a lack of
regulatory clarity. The distinction between
advice and legal restrictions is muddy. Po-
lice complain that they were expected to
uphold Boris Johnson’s edict on March
23rd that the country should go into lock-
down as soon as he announced it, even
though the relevant legislation was not
published for three days. Ministers have
made up their own rules on the hoof, tell-
ing people not to exercise more than once a
day or for more than an hour, neither of
which are stipulated in law. Cops were ini-
tially bombarded with calls from taxi driv-
ers asking if they could continue to work
and divorced parents worried about shar-
ing parental responsibilities, says Kerrin
Wilson, assistant chief constable of Lin-
colnshire Police. “It was so grey.”
Britain’s diffuse policing structure does
not help. Some of England and Wales’s 43
police forces have yet to issue any fines;
others have taken a hard line. A woman in
Tyneside was arrested and fined £660 after
she refused to tell police officers her name
and explain why she was at a railway sta-
tion. Even the National Police Chiefs Coun-
cil, an umbrella group for chief officers,
seems confused. In a conference call it
hosted, a journalist asked whether resi-
dents in the Peak District could drive to go
for a walk in a quiet spot. One senior cop
answered “yes” just as the other said: “The
point is, how do you guarantee there’s no-
body there?”
Restrictions elsewhere are far more dra-
conian. In South Korea, an app alerts the
authorities if citizens stray from their
quarantine. The French must carry a writ-
ten declaration of their reasons for going
out. The fuss in Britain may be particularly
acute precisely because its cops normally
use such a light touch. Most officers are un-
armed. Fatal shootings trigger automatic
inquiries. And, says Lawrence Sherman of
Cambridge University, “there is an abso-
lute cultural dedication to proportionate
policing”. Long may it last. 7Cops have new powers. Some are too
keen to use themPolicing a lockdownBooby on the beat