Global medical revolutions rarely arrive with a knock on a Maidstone front door, but this week, with all the banality of an Amazon delivery, that’s exactly what has been happening.
In eight postcodes in the southeast, the northwest and the West Midlands, home swab kits are being delivered to 80,000 people as part of Operation Eagle, a surge testing programme.
Its goal is to rapidly identify and isolate people infected with the South African variant of coronavirus. In doing so it is reinforcing a global view that it is not only the vaccine procurement that Britain got right.
Scientists at the institute have been working round the clock on sequencing genomes
DAN ROSS/WELLCOME SANGER INSTITUTE
This is a programme that at first many thought pointless but which has in past months risen in prominence. We are, as The Wall Street Journal put
