Professor Susan Michie:

My response will partly address the Deputy's last question and partly address the previous issue she raised. I want to speak to the issue of trust because there is a lot of evidence that trust is really important in getting people to adhere to any policy. Test, trace and isolate requires trust. This is because the trace part of it, the tracing and revealing of contacts, means giving information about contacts. In the UK we have two parallel systems at the moment.

One system is run by a national commercial organisation that has call centres, so people get phone calls from people they do not know. Under the other system, local public health officials contact people. The latter has shown to be much more effective and much of the reason for this is trust. People need to be able to trust where their data are going and that, if they provide information about contacts, that data will be respected and there will not be a punitive policy under which these contacts will be asked to quarantine without the necessary support. Achieving this requires an understanding of the communities. This is where local knowledge comes in. At airports, which do not have that local community feel, some kind of follow-up is important to ensure that people are quarantining. That is, in fact, important in all of this.

This should not be done in a punitive way but in a way that indicates how very important society thinks these measures are and which shows that society is prepared to put resources into follow-up. In countries in which this has been successful, the process has been based on shoe leather - going from door to door and knocking to see whether people are in and if they need any help to carry on isolating. That is the sort of approach that has been successful. This whole area requires a lot of consideration, thought and behavioural advice if one is to get it right.