Professor Paddy Mallon:

Any successful testing and tracing plan needs to be, at the very least, capable of responding to the onset of a new flu season when the rate of people with flu-like symptoms will increase exponentially over a short period. This can be modelled. Looking at our most recent flu season, which just preceded the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be estimated that approximately 103 of every 100,000 people were reporting flu-type symptoms to their local GPs every week. That would correspond to an expected need to diagnose more than 5,000 positive cases per week. We need to be able to go from diagnosing about 100 cases per week to potentially dealing with 5,000 people with symptoms a week, or even more. It should also be taken into account that, if people with Covid-19 slip through the gaps because of delays in testing these higher numbers, not only will we be faced with flu-like illness but also with Covid outbreaks. That will increase the capacity required yet again. That is what we need to be ready for. We need to be ready to roll that out within days. That is where end-to-end testing comes in.