 Limited access to testing for anyone but the extremely ill or the rich and famous has been one of the key challenges the NHS has faced in their struggle against COVID-19. At the Daily Downing Street press conference today, Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, blamed the shortage on problems in the global supply chain, which for me only begs the question why we are so ill-equipped to produce the components needed for testing compared to our neighbours. But there was potentially good news today about another form of testing. Not for whether someone currently has COVID-19, but for whether they have had it in the past. In Parliament today, Professor Sharon Peacock, director of the National Infection Service at Public Health England, told MPs that the government had already ordered 3.5 million of these antibody tests and was about to order millions more. We're going to take a look at the write-up of this story by Sky. Appearing before the House of Common Science and Technology Committee via video link, Prof Peacock said the new tests were rapidly being evaluated at a laboratory in Oxford with 3.5 million having already been ordered. Further millions are being ordered today, Prof Peacock told MPs. She added, in the near future people will be able to order a test so they can test themselves or go to boots or somewhere similar to have their finger prick test done. Asked if the availability of the test to the public would be a number of days rather than weeks or months, she replied, Absolutely. Go to you first, Aaron. A lack of test has been a major problem in terms of this country containing coronavirus. Do you think that this announcement here could be, you know, a game changer? Well, it sounds kind of weird, right? I mean, I kind of, it sounds too good to be true. How, you know, what's the accuracy, most obviously with any testing, there's always a margin of error. There's a certain, you know, certain percentage of people won't have accurate results, pregnancy testing kits, etc. I mean, what's the, I mean, it just seems really odd. You know, last week, we thought that testing kits be highly expensive, labor intensive, professionally administered, and now all of a sudden millions of people are going to be able to use these ultra cheap kits. Almost it seems within days and they'll get, you know, accurate results immediately. So my instinct is, wow, where did that come from? But if it's, if it's there, fantastic. It was amazing. The initial guardian right up with this story, actually, when I first read it, I was like, wow, maybe this whole crisis is over because it just seemed like, you know, millions of us were going to get sent testing. And then suddenly we'd be like South Korea, you know, where they've dealt with it quite well. Everyone knows where they have coronavirus. I think it turns out that one, some of the write-ups, you know, got a bit overexcited. So as far as I understand it, these tests that are being talked about wouldn't tell you if you have COVID-19, which means that it's not particularly helpful for this idea of tracing or tracing and containing. So you work out if someone has COVID-19, then you make them stay in their house and then you find everyone they've been in contact with, test them for COVID-19. And if they have it, you make them stay in their houses. So that's the way of containing coronavirus where it exists. This would be an antibody test. So what that tells you is not whether you have COVID-19, but whether you've had it in the past. And it tests you for that by finding out whether you have the antibodies that are capable of attacking, whether you have immunity to COVID-19 fundamentally. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, it would help our economy start moving and help many of the ordinary aspects of society continue because many people might find out they've already had COVID-19, many people without realizing. And that means they're no longer vulnerable to it for at least a while, as we've talked about on the show before, it's unclear how long that immunity will last. But that would be a game changer, especially for the NHS, because at the moment you've got NHS workers who are taking time off, they've got no choice to, but they're taking time off because they've got a cough. If half of the NHS realize, oh, they've had COVID-19 already, then the next time they get a cough, they don't have to worry about it. The other thing it can do, and this is what the Chief Scientific Advisor, Patrick Valant, seemed very excited about at today's Downing Street Press Conference, was that you can, if you sort of take a random sample of the public and give them this test, you can work out how widespread COVID-19 was in the population. That's helpful for your modeling to work out how close to the peak you are or if you're already over it. Ash, any thoughts on this mass testing? Potentially it's going to be going out via Amazon through 3.5 million people's doors. I mean, look, inshallah, this test is as accurate as the write-ups are saying. And as Aaron said, you know, you do sometimes get false positives and false negatives of various forms of testing. But hopefully this will be accurate. As far as I understand it, it's a bit like taking a blood sugar test if you're a diabetic with the finger prick, which is fairly straightforward. People can do it. They don't need to see provision while they do it. All those things are brilliant. I don't necessarily think that it being commercially available immediately would be a good thing. And the reason why I think that is because what we've seen with lots of the goods that people need during this pandemic is that markets have not been an efficient way of making sure that people who really need an item the most are able to get that item. The priority absolutely has to be workers in the NHS, key workers who are coming into contact with large numbers of people and those who are vulnerable. And then after that, people who have familial caring obligations, who perhaps share a household with people who have health conditions or are elderly. And then after those first priority tests, because really that frees up huge sections of the population to be able to take on that really crucial work of caring for other people, then commercial availability, being able to pick it up in boots, and I imagine they'd be quite a run on it to me seems appropriate. But first and foremost, it's got to go to those who need it most, not simply those who are able to get to the shops and have the money to spend. We've got a very powerful tweet on the hashtag TiskeySour from Victoria Jesper. She tweets, emotional effect on staff is extremely potent right now, tears daily. We are all on edge, unwittingly coming into contact with COVID-19 positive patients, aware that without testing, we might be super spreaders and some having vulnerable family at home who are at risk. Victoria Jesper is a radiographer, so someone who does x-rays. I mean, that rings true for a lot of the things that I've been hearing from some of my friends. And I've actually felt in two minds about tweeting about it or talking about it publicly. Because on the one hand, you really want to share these stories and tell people what it's really like in hospitals at the minute. On the other hand, you're worried about scaring people, right? You're really worried about scaring people. But talking to a friend of mine who is a doctor a couple of years older than me, so you know, quite a young guy. You know, we were at the same sixth form and he was just saying like, yep, it's really horrible. I'm just watching people die and there's not very much I can do to help them get better. And how that feels is a medic to be so disempowered knowing it's going to get worse must just be completely emotionally overwhelming and not even having the time to be able to look after your mental health or seek out professional support as well because it's all hands on deck all the time. I've got nothing but empathy, solidarity and respect for these frontline workers in the NHS. There was also the very sad story that came out today of an intensive care nurse who took her own life. Now, I've got no idea what other factors may have been at play. We know that there were COVID-19 fatalities in the intensive care unit where she worked. And I think that's one of the things that has gone under reported perhaps is just what the cumulative emotional toll of this is going to be on frontline workers. And the fact that there are elements of that stress, particularly around things like personal protective equipment not being available, testing not being available, which are being actively worsened by the government's policy failures. And that's why I'm not going to shut up about holding the government to account over these things because there's a human cost to it and it was avoidable. I suppose on a much less profound level I was thinking today about what the emotional reaction is going to be to these antibody results if they do become available on mass. I was thinking on one level, if you get the positive results, if it says that you've had COVID-19, you're like, yes, I've hit the jackpot because that means that you no longer have to either worry about getting it or giving it to someone else. You can fundamentally live your life almost as usual. But then the flip side of that is going to be how many people did I give it to? Because if you know that you've had COVID-19 and you don't know when you had it, no one's going to have any idea whether they're, I mean, it's a horrible phrase anyway, isn't it? But no one's going to know if they were a super spread or not because we've got no idea. I suppose because of the lack of testing from the start of this crisis, we've got no idea who's the pattern of how this disease has been spread or not much. Yeah, I just wanted to say there's two things. There was an article in The Guardian's Day with Nuri El-Rabini. Everybody should read it, which is just basically an overview as the economic dimensions of what's happening, what's going to happen over the next year, 18 months. And then he speculates about something which is quite plausible, which is that we get on top of this before the end of the year by winter. Let's say by autumn because of commercial testing like this, commercial available testing like this. And we can begin to return back to normal quite slowly, take it step by step. But there would be some mutations and that you might get mutations becoming more of a problem during the traditional flu season of 2020-2021. And then that might then again lead to people having to be staying indoors more than they would like, more remote working than they would like, etc. So there is the possibility of actually trying to come out of this too quickly. Nuri El-Rabini, aka Dr Doom, he was one of the few economists to predict the 2008 crisis. He's an economist. He's not an epidemiologist. But it's one of the scenarios that's being planned in terms of any economic flat lines. That's the first one, the evolution of the virus. The second one is we don't know, as you've said already, we don't know about the immune response. We don't know how long it lasts for. We talked about this with Steve Turner a little while ago. Normally, it's a season with a cold. Is it going to be one season? Will it be three months? Will it be five years? And so somebody might have resistance to it. They might have created the antibodies, say, wow, I've already had this. I can go back to work again. And they might get sick three or six months later because we don't actually know that much about this disease. And so again, it feeds back into my original response about this whole thing, which is it seems odd to me. A virus which nobody knew existed four months ago now has this commercially available test. You can get it within days. Two and a half million people are going to be able to access it. It's going to have a significant accuracy. And it's going to be able to tell people when they can return to the labor market, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, it just seems a lot of if, buts and maybes, given that we should be trying to err on the side of caution with regards to COVID-19 as a public health issue.