The tone of government policy from the start has been one of fatalism: government powerless in the face of an unstoppable virus. The direction of policy has been to ‘protect the NHS’ and to guarantee those suffering from Covid-19 a hospital bed and a ventilator, even though by the time they need one their chances of survival are only 50:50. We refute this sense of helplessness: in the face of such a deadly disease the policy should always have been to limit its spread through the use of testing, contact tracing, and quarantine. Letting the genie out of the bottle through failing to implement effective quarantine was negligent, but it does not prevent us from taking back control of the coronavirus.

It is true that if we relax movement restrictions, we risk a resurgence of infection, which raises the spectre of an endless cycle of lock-down and release until we have a reliable vaccine. This gloomy prospect rests on the assumption that lockdown is the only weapon in our armoury. This is not the case. We have a nationwide, locally-based, public health system and extensive community health services: we should use them now to control this public health crisis as we would with the outbreak of any other dangerous disease.

At the press conference on 9th March, Johnson prepared the country for the end of the containment phase, while Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance said: ‘What you can’t do is suppress this thing completely, and what you shouldn’t do is suppress it completely because all that happens then is it pops up again later in the year when the NHS is at a more vulnerable stage in the winter and you end up with another problem.’ In other words, he was more focused on resource management than on controlling the virus. This is the point at which UK policy went wildly off track. We have to rewind to that point and return to a policy of containment and suppression.

Because of the abandonment of community testing, we currently have no clear sense of the spread of the virus. In the absence of widespread testing, estimates of incidence of the disease can only be derived from extrapolating backwards from deaths and hospital admissions, meaning there is always a lag of 2 to 3 weeks. However, we can identify areas where the pandemic is less intense; in these areas the policy of containment – that was abandoned nationally with the ending of community testing on 12th March – can be reintroduced. As the virus becomes starved of new hosts in our urban centres, as a result of strict social distancing, we can gradually reintroduce containment there too.

We are not starting from a good place and we do not underestimate the size of the challenge. But there are only two alternatives to this, both of which rely on herd immunity. The only safe way to achieve herd immunity is via a vaccine, for which the best guess is that we will have to wait 12-18 months. The eccentric and dangerous idea of achieving herd immunity through allowing a live and deadly virus to run through the population unchecked has been widely condemned by epidemiologists and public health experts.

Even in its own terms of accepting hundreds of thousands of deaths, the idea that we could control Coronavirus through infection-based herd immunity was always misguided. Any such policy makes an assumption about the longevity and effectiveness of immunity acquired through infection. Evidence is emerging that, as with other Coronavirus infections, human immunity to Covid-19 may well be weak and short-lived and the WHO’s Michael Ryan has said that ‘You might have someone who believes they are seropositive (have been infected) and protected in a situation where they may be exposed and in fact they are susceptible to the disease.’

The early flirtation with this flawed idea of herd immunity has made it more difficult to take control of the spread of the virus but, given that we have no vaccine and no guarantee that infection confers immunity, we have no alternative. We must be positive and start building the infrastructure we need to trace and isolate the virus in our communities. This is what we are calling the Community Shield.

We note that in mid-April, First Secretary Dominic Raab outlined five conditions that must be met before we can begin to relax the lockdown, but he pointedly failed to mention the second of the conditions set by the WHO, namely that countries should keep restrictions until they their health systems have capacity to ‘detect, test, isolate and treat every case, and trace every contact’. We fully support the WHO on this point and would not support any emergence from lockdown until it is met.

Given this globally shared understanding, we were shocked to hear Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England Jenny Harries comment towards the end of March that ‘there comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention’ and that testing was somehow appropriate for countries ‘less developed than Britain’. This bizarre and exceptionalist approach to testing has left us running to catch up and led to many of the other serious issues with our pandemic response, especially the loss of health workers from their workplaces and the shocking spread of a deadly disease within our care homes.

There has been some public debate suggesting that, during this crisis, there is a trade-off between saving life and saving the economy. We utterly reject this. A good strategy of containment would achieve both of these objectives simultaneously, as we are seeing from the German example. As a result of a widespread testing campaign, the German government can track where the virus is and be selective about how they open up society; and can then chase and damp down the inevitable secondary outbreaks of Covid-19 that will follow. This will enable a controlled relaxation of movement restrictions and a return to economic activity. Because of the failure to test, UK politicians are flying blind and have only blunt instruments at their disposal.