Dr. Samuel McConkey:

There is a lot to address and I am happy to do some of that in writing. The idea of having protected pods or bubbles is essentially the zero Covid strategy.

We are saying to have a small group of people, who do not have it, and then to protect them by preventing anyone in that group getting it by limiting contacts outside of that group. That is essentially what we are proposing, not just at street level or two houses but at county level or town level, like Ardee, and then, hopefully, at national level. What has been articulated is what we advocate, which is no Covid transmission within, initially, local communities based on local data and the determination of local activists to motivate people to stay within that group.

I agree that this is a challenging time for people's mental health and many people struggle to find what values they cherish. The question on saliva lends itself to a written answer. Unfortunately, one does get false negative results, as Dr. Schaffer correctly said earlier. The level of symptoms that GPs should require before they ask for a test is really challenging. If one has too low a bar then one ends up overwhelming the testing capacity in an unhelpful way and it is too slow then so is not fit for contact tracing purposes but if it is too high then cases are missed.