Testing our way to recovery: One firm on how they’ve navigated the Covid-19 minefield
With light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel, thoughts are increasingly turning to what the ‘new normal’ might look like. Part of that may well include testing. Stuart MacLennan, CEO of testing firm Circular1 Health, tells City PM how they’ve operated testing sites at major manufacturing and military sites since the beginning of the pandemic.
For all the talk of vaccines and herd immunity, it is becoming increasingly clear that monitoring Covid-19 case rates will remain a part of our lives for some time to come.
So the question is – how to do it?
The debate over mass testing took one step forward and two steps back in the Autumn, and the sad truth is that confusion over what constitutes a reliable way of testing large numbers of people in a short space of time continues to reign.
But if we are to win the fight, we need to go on the offensive, to cut through the confusion and identify the most reliable methods of testing that will support the economic and financial turnaround.
The somewhat disastrous trial in Liverpool, using lateral flow tests, did little to build confidence in the system. Some 60 per cent of asymptomatic people who actually had the virus went undetected.
This issue of false negatives, and similarly important false positives, is an ongoing concern, but there is no doubt that part of the problem rests with how the tests were conducted.
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While lateral flow testing is quick and easy to perform, and has a very high specificity, these advantages are quickly swept away if the results cannot be relied upon or a mutation of the virus leads to an even greater number of erroneous results.
How we have been addressing the issue in the immediate term is through the development of a different system that combines two methods of testing – LAMP (Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification) and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) – and conducting both tests in series.
LAMP/PCR tests provide a very high degree of accuracy (more than 99 per cent).
The risk of a false positive is extremely rare (1 in 20,000 tests compared with 1 in 200 with lateral flow) and false negatives rarer still.
Only 0.9 per cent of LAMP/PCR tests will miss the virus compared to anything up to 43 per cent of tests using Lateral Flow.
Through these tests, developed by a British manufacturer, employers have been able to bring their employees safely back to work.
In certain businesses like the nuclear decommissioning site in Sellafield and others that are of national importance, we have helped them to remain open and operate in a COVID-free environment. At other sites too, like BAE Systems, we have supported the safe return of 5,000 employees to its submarine business in Barrow, delivering a much higher level of confidence to employers and employees alike, as well as helping support the local economy and supply chain.
To put the scale of the challenge into context, we have to date delivered more than 250,000 tests and now have the capacity to deliver more than 100,000 tests every day, anywhere in the country.
Fighting our way out of this pandemic and moving forward into the sunlit uplands means not only having a multi-faceted approach, and offering the broadest range of solutions (including Lateral Flow within a quality assurance framework) but also being multi-faceted in our thinking, and not allowing potential barriers to stand in our way. If sending tests off-site to a laboratory is causing delays, then creating mobile laboratories and having them in situ is the answer, as we have proven. It is a route we are continuing to deploy with multiple customers.
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For it is not just in those mission critical areas that we can see mass testing supporting us through the pandemic and beyond. The same theory is also now being applied in the leisure industry, for example, to create safe ‘bubbles’ of passengers and staff to re-invigorate the Cruise sector, or re-open residential holiday and activity centres.
Given the UK tourism industry is estimated to be valued at £106 billion and support some 3.8 million jobs, the economic and financial imperative is clear for all to see. Recovering even a small percentage of that volume will deliver real economic value, and send a positive message to other industries that a recovery is possible.
This new model known as ‘Test to Operate’ (T2O) – an active combination of testing and screening – will help us take the offensive and get the country open again. The financial support measures introduced by Government – thought to have totalled £280 billion in 2020 – cannot go on indefinitely, and it is incumbent upon businesses like ours to find new ways of helping businesses get back to work and fuel the economic recovery. Confidence is key, which means that a robust testing regime, and the ability to create safe havens for returning employees, will be essential to maintaining the dynamic of the City, and supporting the wider financial and social ecosystem.
We also need to be thinking beyond COVID-19, for example in the wider impact it is having on people’s mental health and wellbeing, and the economic costs this also has in terms of absenteeism in the workplace. Fighting our way through the pandemic means supporting people on the other side, monitoring and tracking trends in their physical and mental state.
It also means acting responsibly in terms of the environment and seeking ways of limiting the impact that testing products and waste materials will inevitably have on the environment.
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