Operation Moonshot

Operation Moonshot is a programme by the UK government to allow many people in England to be tested for COVID-19 as a way to allow large gatherings of people to happen there while maintaining control over the virus. According to the British Medical Journal, the programme aims to perform 10 million tests per day by 2021.

People are worried about it because, as a leaked government document says, it is thought it may cost £100bn, which is about three-quarters of what the NHS England costs every year. Statisticians say because any test can have inaccuracies, mass testing at this scale might cause hundreds of thousands of false positives a day, resulting in very large numbers of people being told they are infected when they are not infected.