Operation Moonshot

This article needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (April 2021)

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[1]

On 22 October 2020, it was reported that the project had been "subsumed" into the NHS Test and Trace programme run by Dido Harding.^[2] As of April 2021, the UK continued to place particular emphasis on mass screening using lateral flow tests, available as at-home kits.^[3]