Originally Posted by
milleriom
I could not agree with you more. ''A more rigorous testing regime'' has been wholly absent here in the Isle of Man. The brilliant Rachel Glover is the expert in molecular ecology, bio-surveillance, bioinformatics and genomics who found some old disused testing equipment at Noble's and got it back up-and-working thereby providing the locally based testing facilities which have been of such very great benefit to the island. She is seriously furious at the IOMG's hugely inadequate scope of its testing regime. She has gone on record now with some of her anger and at yesterday's IOMG Press Conference the Health Minister tried to address her complaints but it sounded as if he really failed to do that. You can see some of Rachel's views on this here (see her posts on 8 & 13 October 2020):
https://twitter.com/rachomics?lang=en
I am going to be away from more than occasional very limited online access for the next couple of days so I shall just wish everyone a very good weekend. Stay well.
It looks like you and I may be more aligned on our thoughts about all this than I initially gave you credit for.
My take is if the testing regime was more comprehensive, the island will be much better prepared if/when COVID transmission in the community returns. From afar, I do get the impression there's an element of complacency due to the borders being practically closed and a near-normal summer being possible thanks to social distancing protocols being binned back 4 months ago. Additionally, if similar islands such as Jersey can implement testing schemes to allow some sort of normality of movement on/off the island. then it's surely not beyond the Isle of Man's capabilities to implement something similar if they really wanted. Many places elsewhere are learning to live with the virus until it either burns out or a vaccine comes along. It's in the Isle of Man's interests to be able to do likewise. Dr Glover is right when she tweeted that the island can't completely keep it out (see events over the last 6 weeks), but it can be managed, as well as making the point that instead of using data from the UK the government can make decisions using their own data.