Living with… or forgetting about COVID?
Ian Bolland provides his thoughts on the end of free COVID-19 testing in England.
The 1st of April marks the end of the free provision of lateral flow testing in the UK. Some would suggest that the date is quite apt, as it’s part of the government’s living with COVID plan, which removes one of the key tools that allows us to recognise whether we have a strain of a condition that has taken the lives of more than 162,000 people across the country, with deaths still averaging 140 per day at the time of writing this column.
Tests are still readily available but if you want a test, that must be paid for out of your own pocket, not by the money that you have already paid to the taxman. Though you can argue that the cost of purchasing a test – with some companies offering them for £1.99 – isn’t that much, it’s still an unwelcome choice falling upon the population when other world and economic events are fuelling a rise in the cost of living.
Taking a step back, it would appear that those who can afford to test regularly may continue to do so – though this is not a guarantee, but an obvious knock-on effect of this policy is likely to be a widening health inequality in the UK dependent on income.
It’s hard to argue against it being a more ideological choice when it comes to reducing public spending after there has been such a necessary outlay to prevent even more suffering across the country.
Then there’s the aspect of people getting COVID that don’t know about it. Chains of transmission are not broken and though the threat of the disease has now reduced due to most of the population having received three vaccinations, the daily death count shows that a diminishing threat is not one that’s eliminated.
This reduces oversight on the disease which caused many operations to be cancelled, patients needing essential treatment, meaning there is a huge backlog that needs to be tackled. Though plans have been announced to try and tackle said backlog, allowing the disease to go through the population unmonitored appears counterproductive to those efforts.
And what about new variants? There is a good chance that Omicron may not be the last of the variants. How do we know if we need to step up testing again to the same degree as previously if case numbers are slipping through the net?
Recent months has seen a return to normality. With masks and testing to protect each other, these are not restrictions and never have been. To portray any public health measure that allows you to go about doing everyday things is barmy.
The elephant in the room here is that this is entirely political after the prime minister presided over several seemingly lockdown breaching events that have belatedly required a police investigation, and a time when his own position has come under threat. With many lockdown sceptics in his party, should we really be surprised that getting rid of every aspect of ensuring that COVID is controlled and managed, is abolished and we pretend like nothing else ever happened?
Maybe this will be one of many aspects investigated in the public inquiry which is due to begin soon.