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Relief as my son and his childminder tested negative for coronavirus using self-test kits

THE relief was palpable when on Sunday morning the emails from Randox Health dropped into my inbox.

My one-year-old and his childminder had both tested negative for Covid19.

Last week I had written about the fear that had gripped my household when my youngest became quite ill with a dry cough and temperature. His childminder had developed similar milder symptoms.

Had we unwittingly passed on this potentially deadly virus to anyone else? Particularly family members with underlying health conditions?

The tests took five days to be delivered and the results from the quick swab test took five days to come back.

With each day that came and went we had become a bit more relaxed as no one else who had been in contact with us had come down with symptoms.

Nevertheless, to have it confirmed that we hadn’t potentially passed on the ‘big bully’ (as my four-year-old calls coronavirus) to anyone else, was an enormous weight off our shoulders.

The World Health Organisation has said the way to beat coronavirus is by "testing, testing, testing", but the UK is testing substantially fewer people than countries than the Republic, South Korea, Italy and Germany.

David Duong a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Health and Healthcare gives a good example of how things should be done.

He points to Vietnam. It borders China and yet they have reported very few cases and no deaths so far.

When the first cases were imported into the country, the government immediately put protocols in place, and started mobilising domestic masks, Personal Protecive Equipment (PPE) and started looking at diagnostic testing options.

They were in a state of containment, and therefore tested and then isolated positive patients and their contacts.

Vietnam, he said, mounted a “whole of government” response quite early in the epidemic, closing their borders, and deployed testing and isolation protocols.

This strategy allowed them to keep their numbers down and contain the spread.

Much closer to home, the Republic is attempting to limit spread as rapidly as possible. The aim is to identify people developing the disease through widespread intensive community testing. It then traces close contacts of those testing positive for the virus and ensure that both patients and contacts are isolated.

In the north, community testing and contact tracing were abandoned on March 13 and, following the rest of the UK, testing is largely reserved for hospital inpatients and health service staff.

Politicians, medics and your best friend’s cousin’s postman have all been extolling the importance of testing and yet the latest figures suggest Stormont has only tested 6,899 people.

I received a lot of messages about last week’s article. Many thanked me for making them aware that such tests were available for sale (note to reader: Randox has since stopped taking new orders because of the demand for their private kits) and were exasperated at the lack of testing available on the NHS. Many healthcare workers got in touch complaining about the last of testing meaning they couldn’t get back to work.

Some messages were from readers angered that Randox was not selling them for cheaper or indeed giving them to the NHS for free.

Randox has since partnered with the NHS and are part of a programme to test frontline NHS workers, including those in Northern Ireland.

A spokesperson for Randox said: “Please rest assured that Randox are committed to testing at scale and know that this is the most effective way to both save lives and promote a timely return to a more normal society.”

The government is facing growing criticism over its failure to utilise lab space, testing machines and trained technicians available at universities, and private laboratories.

I understand that our Executive is united in trying to save lives.

And I thank them for this.

But I cannot see light at the end of the tunnel.

Will we be stuck in our houses because of this failure to test and contain, as the economy sinks into recession and potentially depression? I fear the answer is yes. I hope I am wrong.