Has UK’s beleaguered Boris jumped on Slovakia’s Covid-19 battle-bus?

Boris Johnson appears to have grabbed Slovakia’s apron strings in his never-ending battle wagon to control Covid-19.

As he addressed the British nation ahead of mass testing in Liverpool – modelled on Slovakia’s test-the-nation programme – he intimated that there is only the UK and Slovakia doing this.

However, it is fair to say that Britain is testing a city while Slovakia is testing a whole country. Logistics obviously make a difference here … i.e. 5.4m people compared to 70-odd million.

Isn’t then the UK’s testing regime more akin to China’s where mass testing has been going on for some time now. Around 4.7m people in Kashgar were tested recently.

China has of course been largely successful in bringing infection rates down, but there continue to be outbreaks.

Anyway, despite Boris’s hubris, the view is that Liverpool has “absolutely nothing to lose” by taking part in this first trial of a whole city in England, the city’s mayor has said.

Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson said the testing pilot could save lives, stop hospitals being overwhelmed and “get the city out of tier three restrictions”.

And Liverpool’s director of public health Matthew Ashton told BBC Breakfast it could last longer, saying he wants “to make sure [the pilot is] long enough for us to be able to see the impact”.

But in support of Boris, Slovak Defence Minister Jaroslav Nad (OLaNO) said on social media “Britain has asked us to provide our precious experience and counsel from this ground-breaking project to the closest advisers of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson”.

He said: “Foreign countries, apart from looking at the preparations and course of our across-the-board testing, are gradually preparing their crisis management teams for situations that would result in decisions to take up the same course of action.

Meanwhile, Slovakia’s Prime Minister Igor Matovic has praised those involved in testing on social media. He said on Facebook; “Village and city mayors, civil servants, village or city deputies, soldiers, state, city and local police, firefighters and paramedics, health care workers, volunteers, and all of you, people of good will, who did your part and decided to fight for the health of our most vulnerable.”

And he said that masks would continue to be mandatory in all public areas in Slovakia. The country has reported 61,829 cases and 219 deaths so far.

But Mike Tildesley, a UK government scientific adviser, has warned that the initial testing programmes need to be followed up regularly; “It is important to realize that just because someone tests negative it does not mean that they will necessarily be free from infection a few days later, so any mass testing strategy needs to be carried out at regular intervals – every few days – in order to be an effective strategy and to allow some lock-down measures to be relaxed.”

However, details of follow-up testing remain obscure. The UK’s Housing and Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said: “The offer to the people of Liverpool is clear, which is that anyone can be tested regardless of whether you have the symptoms or not, and we will make available enough testing capacity to do that on a regular basis.”

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