England’s contact-tracing system (finally) gets parochial

LEICESTER HAS become an unlikely hotbed of covid experimentation. In June the East Midlands city, home to 355,000, was the first to return to lockdown, as the government played “whack-a-mole” with the virus. Since July 17th it has pioneered a more sophisticated approach. The local council has created a team of 21 staff to hunt down cases beyond the reach of the national contact-tracing system. For the most recalcitrant, this involves multiple home visits in full PPE. The effort has been worthwhile: the council says it has found 89% of those whose details they have been passed.

Public-health experts have long argued that contact tracing in England needs to make more use of local knowledge—to find stubborn cases, to work with local leaders, to persuade people to isolate. On August 10th the government tacitly admitted they may have a point. It announced the national test-and-trace system would be rewired, with local public-health teams taking the lead. Some 6,000 of the 18,000 centrally employed contact tracers would be let go. The rest would support local efforts.

Many of the 18,000 have had little to do in recent weeks. Tests are mostly reserved for those with symptoms, meaning asymptomatic cases are rarely caught. Whereas the Office for National Statistics estimates that around 28,000 people had covid-19 in the week to...