Fascinating reading. 10 findings about the UK response to COVID-19 and 10 recommendations for the Government, from @GregClarkMP & @CommonsSTC. Thread. https://twitter.com/CommonsSTC/status/1262646924240281600

"Finding 1 (F1): The Government has sought to obtain and act on good scientific advice"
Recommendation 1 (R1): continue.

F2: "The transparency around scientific advice has not always been as clear as it should have been."
R2: improve, esp 4 SAGE. "Without visibility of the scientific advice it will be difficult to corroborate the Government’s assertion that it always follows the scientific advice."

F3: "The provision of scientific advice has been well co-ordinated between all four nations of the United Kingdom."
R3: continue.

F4, the biggie: "Testing capacity has been inadequate for most of the pandemic so far. Capacity was not increased early enough or boldly enough. Capacity drove strategy, rather than strategy driving capacity."
...

"it meant that residents in care homes—even those displaying COVID-19 symptoms—and care home workers could not be tested at a time when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant."
R4: publish the assessment that gave us limited, centralised, sequential testing ramp up.

F5: "It is not clear that the lessons of the delays to testing have been learned."
R5: "The Government should learn and apply the lessons
from the slowness of the provision of testing capacity and take every opportunity to build capacity in advance of need"

F6: "Strategies to deal with carriers of COVID-19 who were asymptomatic have not been clear."
(There follows citations suggesting 60 to nearly 100% of cases asymptomatic: a highly imbalanced survey of studies. Likely much lower. No symptoms *yet* does not mean no symptoms ever.)

R6: "The Government should explicitly set out its approach to managing the risk of asymptomatic transmission of the disease."
Asymptomatic *or pre-symptomatic*, absolutely. Test, trace, isolate. https://twitter.com/ChrisWymant/status/1257347231717502982

F7: "In combination with other measures, contact tracing can help to reduce the spread of disease. The UK’s limited capacity for contact tracing was an important factor in the decision to stop full contact tracing
on 12 March."

CMO: contract tracing a "very powerful tool of public health”, but “unbelievably labour intensive” if done manually.
One reason to incorporate digital contact tracing: scalability.

Another: speed.
"Professor Christophe Fraser [ @ChristoPhraser] told us that the use of digital contact tracing applications would be necessary to manage the spread of COVID-19 as manual efforts would be 'unlikely to be quick enough' to inform those who might be infected."

R7: "The Government must urgently build up contact
tracing capacity in order to facilitate further easing of social distancing measures as soon as possible, while minimising the risk of a second peak in infections."

F8: "The role of isolation in combination with testing and tracing has been important in countries which have, so far, tackled the pandemic effectively."
Valuable lessons from other countries. @gmleunghku gave evidence on highly effective quarantining procedures in Hong Kong.

"While intrusive [&costly, quarantining away from home] may be worthwhile when set against the more hidden but vastly greater cost of maintaining tighter restrictions on the rest of the population for longer if infected
individuals are less rigorously isolated from society."

R8: "The Government should set out the role of isolation
and quarantine as part of its test, track and trace strategy, ensuring that it draws on the experiences of other countries."

F9: "The development and deployment of vaccines could be critical to halting the COVID-19 pandemic."
R9: "The Government should build capacity for vaccine
manufacture and deployment now *in advance of need* and so that their mass use can start as soon as their safety is proven."

F10: "There are significant unexplained differences in the death rates in the UK of Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups compared to the population as a whole."
Calls for investigation.
R10: record ethnicity systematically in those dying. [Perhaps not just those dying?]