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Operation Moonshot
Operation Moonshot was a UK government programme to introduce same-day mass testing for COVID-19 in England as a way of enabling large gatherings of people to take place in that country while maintaining control over the virus. According to the British Medical Journal, the programme aimed to deliver 10 million tests per day by 2021.
The programme led to concerns over its expected cost of £100bn, according to a leaked government document, which would be about three-quarters of the total annual cost of NHS England. Statisticians warned that given the inaccuracies inherent in any test, mass testing at this scale was liable to cause hundreds of thousands of false positives a day, resulting in large numbers of people being told that they are infected when they are not.
On 22 October 2020, it was reported that the project had been "subsumed" into the NHS Test and Trace programme run by Dido Harding. As of April 2021, the UK continued to place particular emphasis on mass screening using lateral flow tests, available as at-home kits.
The test being proposed for the programme relied on the development of new technology for saliva samples or swab samples to give a positive or negative reading within minutes, rather than requiring analysis at a laboratory, a process that can take several days. In this way, it was described by media, including the Sheffield Telegraph, as being similar to a pregnancy test. In making a test of this type available, it was projected to negate the need for people to travel to a test centre, something that could require a lengthy journey.
The operation sat within the UK's Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) response to COVID-19. Initially, it was a separate government programme, but eventually was subsumed within the national NHS Test and Trace programme. Within the operation, a number of semi-independent teams were established at pace to develop and evaluate COVID-19 technologies that at the time were essentially experimental and unproven.[citation needed]
The remit of each team was to establish and develop a single form of COVID-19 testing. Each team had an academic lead and focussed on development of a single technology: direct LAMP, LAMPore, mass spectrometry, RNA LAMP, point of care PCR, machine-reader lateral flow tests, and non-machine based lateral flow tests.[citation needed]
The triage and evaluation of plans for machine-based technology was led by the UK government's TVG (Technical validation group) and non-machine based technology by the COVID-19 Oversight group with input from Public Health England, National Health Service, academic/scientific advisors and DHSC.
LAMP development was led by Prof Keith Godfrey at the University of Southampton.
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Operation Moonshot AI simulator
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Operation Moonshot
Operation Moonshot was a UK government programme to introduce same-day mass testing for COVID-19 in England as a way of enabling large gatherings of people to take place in that country while maintaining control over the virus. According to the British Medical Journal, the programme aimed to deliver 10 million tests per day by 2021.
The programme led to concerns over its expected cost of £100bn, according to a leaked government document, which would be about three-quarters of the total annual cost of NHS England. Statisticians warned that given the inaccuracies inherent in any test, mass testing at this scale was liable to cause hundreds of thousands of false positives a day, resulting in large numbers of people being told that they are infected when they are not.
On 22 October 2020, it was reported that the project had been "subsumed" into the NHS Test and Trace programme run by Dido Harding. As of April 2021, the UK continued to place particular emphasis on mass screening using lateral flow tests, available as at-home kits.
The test being proposed for the programme relied on the development of new technology for saliva samples or swab samples to give a positive or negative reading within minutes, rather than requiring analysis at a laboratory, a process that can take several days. In this way, it was described by media, including the Sheffield Telegraph, as being similar to a pregnancy test. In making a test of this type available, it was projected to negate the need for people to travel to a test centre, something that could require a lengthy journey.
The operation sat within the UK's Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) response to COVID-19. Initially, it was a separate government programme, but eventually was subsumed within the national NHS Test and Trace programme. Within the operation, a number of semi-independent teams were established at pace to develop and evaluate COVID-19 technologies that at the time were essentially experimental and unproven.[citation needed]
The remit of each team was to establish and develop a single form of COVID-19 testing. Each team had an academic lead and focussed on development of a single technology: direct LAMP, LAMPore, mass spectrometry, RNA LAMP, point of care PCR, machine-reader lateral flow tests, and non-machine based lateral flow tests.[citation needed]
The triage and evaluation of plans for machine-based technology was led by the UK government's TVG (Technical validation group) and non-machine based technology by the COVID-19 Oversight group with input from Public Health England, National Health Service, academic/scientific advisors and DHSC.
LAMP development was led by Prof Keith Godfrey at the University of Southampton.