My committee took evidence months ago now from Sir John Bell, the very distinguished regius professor at Oxford, who said that what should happen is, of course people testing positive for Covid need to isolate, but contacts should be able to take a test and isolate if positive, but go about their business if negative.
That would avoid much of the disruption that we have and, actually, and Sir John made this point, would cause people to be more compliant with the advice.
Many people think that 10 days isolation is pretty onerous and some of them will not comply with it.
We know that on August 16 a new system will come in, in which you can take a test if you’re named as a contact and only isolate if you’re positive – I don’t see why we can’t begin that now on July 23 rather than wait.
