What is Operation Moonshot and is Boris Johnson's Covid testing plan feasible?

AFP via Getty Images
Kit Heren10 September 2020

Until a successful vaccine is found, it's likely that the only way to get back to something resembling normal life is a mass coronavirus testing regime.

The Government recently announced a programme to achieve this, with capacity for millions of people potentially able to get tests each day.

Dubbed "Operation Moonshot", the plan has been greeted with scepticism by experts, with daily testing rates still usually hovering below or around 200,000 per day.

Here we look at Operation Moonshot and its prospects for being successfully implemented.

People queuing for a coronavirus testing centre in Walthamstow
Lucy Young

What is Operation Moonshot?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that millions of people could be tested every day so they could “behave in a way that was exactly as in the world before Covid”.

Theatres and sports venues could test all audience members and let in those with a negative result, he added at a Downing Street briefing on Wednesday.

Mr Johnson said: "We’re hoping the ‘Moonshot’ approach will work and we will be able to deliver mass testing which will give people the freedom pass, the ‘laissez-passer’, the knowledge that they are not infectious and can hang out with other people who are not infectious in a pre-Covid way."

But the Prime Minister added that the ambitious plan could easily fail, warning: "We cannot be 100% sure that we can deliver that in its entirety.”

Grant Shapps on PM's moonshot attempt: Something which doesn't exist at the moment

And Transport Secretary Grant Shapps admitted that the technology for the Government’s plan does not yet exist.

Speaking on Sky News, he said: “We know this isn’t simple to achieve, but we hope it will be possible through technology and new tests to have a test which works by not having to return the sample to a lab.”

He said the Government was hoping to develop a test that provided a result in as little as 20-90 minutes.

“This is technology that, to be perfectly blunt, requires further development – there isn’t a certified test in the world that does this but there are people that are working on prototypes,” he said.

An NHS COVID-19 walk-in testing centre in Bolton
AFP via Getty Images

How much would it cost?

The Government's ambitious mass coronavirus testing plans could cost as much as £100 billion, according to reports.

The “Operation Moonshot” project would see millions of UK-wide tests carried out daily.

But it could have a price tag close to that of the £114 billion budget given to NHS England in 2018/19, according to leaked documents seen by the BMJ.

A testing centre in the UK 
Reuters

What are experts saying?

The plans were met with mixed reaction from the health and scientific community, with concerns raised over the implications of a negative test result.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, council chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA), said it was unclear how it would work given the “huge problems” currently seen with lab capacity.

The Deputy chief medical officer, Dr Jenny Harries, said the success of Moonshot would depend on how it is handled.

She told ITV’s Robert Peston: “We do want to get back to as much normality as we can and any opportunity to do that through a new testing programme or using different testing technology is clearly a good thing to be following, but it’s not quite as simple as just doing that.”