Test and trace: did it do any good?

What has happened?

ast week the House of Commons public-accounts committee – the parliamentary body that acts as a public-spending watchdog – issued a damning report into the government’s £37bn, NHS-branded “test and trace” (T&T) system. The report did accept that the programme, led by Dido Harding, has done an awful lot of testing and tracing. It found that between May 2020 and January 2021, the UK’s daily Covid testing capacity increased from around 100,000 to more than 800,000 tests. During that time, T&T contacted more than 2.5 million people testing positive in