When is a test not a test?

When is a test not a test? Apparently it’s always a test now. If you’re sitting at home minding your own business and they post you a test kit – you’ve been tested. The government has changed the definition of a test from – a test carried out, analysed and results posted – to just the first and last words “test” and “posted”.

The Health Service Journal has reported  “The Department of Health and Social Care is now including tests that have been posted or delivered to people’s homes in its figures. This means tests which are sent to people are counted before the recipient has provided and returned their sample to a laboratory.

HSJ understands that up to 50,000 of the tests that will be reported as having taken place on 30 April will actually represent “the mailing or the agreeing to mail a home testing kit.”

So, even the “posted” bit is stretching it, inasmuch as if the Department of Health and Social Security agrees to send out a test, it will be marked as a done test. This is how the DHSC is able to report a rise of fifty-eight thousand tests, from 23,560 tests to 81,611 tests in the week leading up to the 30th April. They have posted them.

According to the HSJ, they had to get the permanent secretary at the DHSC, Chris Wormald, to agree to a change in the counting process. This is because the HSC Secretary, Matt Hancock, is obsessed with reaching the target of 100,000 tests per day.

A source for the HSJ said, “We’re now counting a home test as tests which have been sent to people’s homes.” That is, not “tests sent, carried out, sent back, processed and results published.”

The sheer duplicity of this is the result of Hancock setting himself a target he could not hope to achieve given the resources available and the negative publicity outcomes that will result from that, but also because it is one of the five “pillars” within the governments testing strategy. These five tests have to be satisfied in order for PM Johnson to declare “We have bashed that Covid blighter, so you can all go and jolly-well run around again.”

Don’t blame them if you die as a result.

About a third of the testing kits sent out by Amazon have been returned. Meanwhile, a pair of new testing programmes have been announced under pillar four of the strategy, which is supposed to include hundreds of thousands of people. The pillar-four element will also include an attempt to track coronavirus in the general population and this is being led by the DHSC and the Office for National Statistics, aided by the University of Oxford, data science company IQVIA UK, and the National Biosample Centre in Milton Keynes.

In future initiatives, it is believed that future testing will, in fact, be a spelling test. If you can spell the word “Covid”, you’re done, mate.