Public service announcement thread explaining some public health concepts the British Public don’t understand

1) Testing: The purpose of testing is to find out who has the virus. This information can be used to work out if they need treatment, to separate them from the rest of

The population so they don’t transmit the virus to other people, and to find out who might have already infected other people. Finding out who has the virus is the primary motive for testing. In a pandemic it shouldn’t really be used primarily to work out who doesn’t have the

virus and tell them they are safe to go back into circulation. Not only do the tests not reliably tell you this, but it is ultimately less of a concern for public safety. A test isn’t about whether you personally are healthy or sick; it’s about whether action is needed to protect

Others. It may also be used to *confirm* whether your symptoms are COVID so that you can get the right treatment.

2) Contact tracing: the idea is to work out all the people who could have been infected by a sick person, and to remove them from the population in case they might

become infectious. Since people are infectious *before symptoms appear* and since *it can take 14 days for those symptoms to appear*, all people who have been in contact with a sick person should be told to isolate away from the population. Contact tracing is a process: it isn’t

An app or an institution. It can be carried out in various ways, from door knocking to phone calls, to alerting people who have been in a building together. We can also do a thing called backwards contact tracing where we try to find out where infected people got sick. This is

Really useful with COVID because the evidence is starting to suggest most people get sick from “super spreading events” so if we can quickly work out where a person has been we can find more cases. The trouble is, because it can take 14 days for symptoms to appear this can be

Quite difficult.

Isolation: The idea is that infectious people and potentially infectious people are completely removed from the population, so they can’t spread the virus. Telling people to “stay at home” is not real isolation: they will infect others within their households

And the vast majority of people sent home to self-isolated haven’t been doing it. Other countries have isolated people outside their homes. The virus spreads from close contact, sharing surfaces, and sharing indoor spaces. Isolation should mean these things don’t happen. Right

Now fewer than 20% of people asked to self-isolate are doing it. And of those, a vast majority are “isolating” in households where they can still spread the virus to others.

Support: since isolation is difficult, people need support to do it. This might mean being given a place

To stay, where they can be isolated, being provided with food and medicine, as well as being given financial support while they are unable to earn anything. It might mean frequent phone calls to make sure they are ok, that their mental health is fine, that their physical health

Is fine, and that they are complying with isolation.

As you will see, the government is not doing any of these things properly. It isn’t a failure of systems: it is a complete misunderstanding of all of the concepts. They think it should just be a corporate process. Because

they don’t understand the purpose of these measures, they are just implementing them in the most minimal and least effective ways. It is like going through the motions without understanding or believing in any of it. There should be enormous public pressure around all of this.