Mark Gallagher, a consultant cardiologist, is at home with a temperature of 38 and is pretty certain he has Covid-19. But the NHS will not test him for it. Instead, he has paid for a test kit from a private UK clinic and a colleague in China is sending him another.

Gallagher has been in and out of his London hospital every day for the last 28 in a row. In the past couple of weeks he saw maybe 70 people in outpatients, he said.

He cannot understand why the NHS will not test him or other healthcare workers who are put at risk by their work and risk infecting other vulnerable patients in turn, as well as their families. “The policy is that I don’t need to be tested and even the people who have been in contact with me aren’t going to be tested,” he said.

“They are abandoning the basic principles for dealing with an epidemic, which are to test whenever possible, trace contacts and contain. Almost all individual physicians I know feel that what they are doing is wrong.”

Last week, a woman of 79 was admitted to his care for an elective, non-urgent procedure. She was then diagnosed with Covid-19, which, he says, “she almost certainly acquired on our wards”. She was put on a ventilator but died on Monday night.

“I’m sure she will go down as an elderly patient with underlying conditions, but she should have lived to 90,” he said. “Approximately 50 nurses dealt with her and many doctors. None has been tested. All are still at work.”

Gallagher says he needs to know whether he has Covid-19. Of the colleague in China who is sending him a test kit, he says: “He runs a similar unit to ours. They had to shut half the hospital for six weeks and make it a Covid-19 hospital, but for the last two weeks they are up pretty much as normal.”

Except, he says, that every patient scheduled to come in is tested first for Covid-19. If the test is negative – as these days it usually is – they will be admitted after a second negative test on arrival. They went through a total lockdown and they tested and tracked the contacts of every single suspected case and tested them as well. “That’s how you kill an epidemic,” he said.

Although the self-isolation policies announced by the prime minister on Monday were a slight improvement, Gallagher feels they are not enough. “It could be eliminated if we worked really hard, but there is a policy of surrender,” he said.

“Our in-house occupational health and infection control teams are competent and hard-working and the infection control people have been at excellent and brave, circulating on the affected wards,” he said.

The problem is the instructions coming out of Public Health England and the government, which is attempting to control the UK epidemic by mathematical modelling.

“Any such model is only as good as the input data, and the data going into this one are not necessarily applicable to the UK being based on countries with very different behaviour patterns,” he said. “They are also solely intended to flatten the curve, when even a flat curve will kill thousands. These approaches would be an acceptable experiment if there were no alternatives but we have strategies from elsewhere that have been shown to work.”

We should be learning the lessons, he says, from the sharp lockdown in Hubei – and the very energetic contact tracing that has taken place in South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. The approach of the UK falls far short of that.