Cutting the cost of Covid tests for travellers | Letters

Mike Whittaker has a suggestion to reduce test costs for those wishing to travel abroad, while Catherine Dunn says that if the government invested in public health infrastructure, we would have a more effective testing system

Your article (Airlines warn the cost of Covid tests will stop people going abroad, 9 April) considers the cost of Covid tests for a family, calculated as the cost of a single test, multiplied by the number in the travel group.

But the tests are to detect if any person in the group has the virus. Hence in principle, the samples from all persons in a travel group could be combined into one single sample tube, which is then tested with a single test. A positive result would then show that somebody in the group had Covid, thereby preventing the whole group from travelling. This would allow costs to be reduced for each travel group.
Mike Whittaker
Stapleton, Shropshire