Some form of border testing will still be needed as Covid restrictions are lifted, the public health director believes.

Dr Henrietta Ewart told Tynwald’s public accounts committee that without border testing we cannot quickly identify new variants of the virus as they arrive here.

Dr Ewart said it troubled her greatly that opening the borders will increase the risk of bringing in variants which may be ones of concern.

’If we don’t test we won’t know,’ she said.

’And we won’t know unless or until somebody who has brought it over - and it might be several steps down the line as they’ve passed it on to other people - presents as symptomatic and actually get a swab and PCR and we can test for variants.’

She said border testing comes at considerable cost. Guernsey spent £4m on setting up testing stations at the port and airport - and told Thursday’s Covid briefing that this model would probably not be followed.

The island last year went instead for the Grandstand system which Dr Ewart said may have capacity issues as we open up the borders to bigger numbers.

Ultimately it wasn’t her decision but that of policy makers, she told the Tynwald committee.

She said we don’t yet know how concerned we should be about the Indian variant in terms of transmissibility, severity of illness and ability to evade the vaccine.

Cases have already been identified in the UK but it had not yet been designated a variant of concern.

While it could be a problem it might not necessarily change the public health response, said the public health director, who said it is now known that vaccines dampen down transmission.

Committee member Chris Robertshaw MHK said: ’If it arrives on the island and we don’t do automatic border testing, we might reasonably assume it could be a minimum of three, a maximum of seven, eight, nine, 10 days before we saw it and took us another number of days before we knew what it was.’

’That could be up to two weeks - are you comfortable with that?’ he asked.

The witness replied: ’We may not see it if it comes on-island, that’s the whole problem.

’If we have no border testing, people are just coming and going. And somebody who comes in who has it and is asymptomatic they won’t know and they may pass it on.’

Chief Minister Howard Quayle told Thursday’s press briefing that this was something that would be constantly reviewed.

Dr Ewart stressed that her role throughout has been one of professional adviser and she has had no managerial input into Covid policy decisions.

Asked about the merits of genomic testing, as advocated by Dr Rachel Glover, Dr Ewart said it had not been demonstrated to her that it is essential for the immediate response to cases, clusters and outbreaks.

Tynwald’s public accounts committee will take evidence from Health Minister David Ashford and his department’s chief executive Kathryn Magson on Wednesday, May 12, as part of its inquiry into the use of genomic sequencing.