Tony Blair has urged the government to roll out mass Covid-19 testing before the end of 2020.
The former prime minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “If 70 per cent of the cases are asymptomatic, you are not testing those people, they are all false negatives at the moment.
“The people out there who have got the disease but have got no symptoms yet can still spread the disease are in effect a false negative.
“So, yes, it is true that you will miss some people … this is where I think the government has got to change the way it calculates risk.
“In every single aspect of this, once you realise you’re not going to eradicate the disease, you’re going to have to contain it and live with it at least until a vaccine comes, then you’ve just got to have a sensible risk calculus in every area.
“So, for example, now we’re telling people to go back into pubs, we’re incentivising, quite rightly for the purposes of getting the economy moving, to go and eat out. All of those things are risks.
“I think the way we’re doing the quarantine rules is wrong actually. I think you could cut that 14-day quarantine substantially if you recognise that whatever you do there is going to be a risk, you just have to minimise it.”
