UK faces testing crunch as crisis worsens
Despite countless promises to “ramp up testing,” numbers have remained stubbornly low as the government has struggled with both its capacity to increase testing and its ability to convince Brits that its strategy will work.
While the British government is now pledging to roll out mass testing, this has been delayed by an apparent de-prioritization of testing in mid-March when the government decided to test only the most serious cases.
In daily press conferences since, top government ministers and their scientific advisers have declined to answer repeated questions about whether this change in strategy was a deliberate choice or the result of a lack of testing resources.
“If its because we dont have capacity, then say that. And outline plans to build it,” said Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “Be straight with the public as there is confusion over whether testing is even part of the U.K. strategy.”
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock | Peter Summers/Getty Images
In the latest of a series of communication mishaps to befall the government, Health Secretary Matt Hancock inadvertently revealed over last weekend that the U.K. wasnt even using its full capacity for testing.
After Hancock tweeted on March 29 that the country had reached 10,000 tests a day, Public Health England followed up the next day clarifying that while the capacity had increased to 10,949 a day, the actual number of tests being done on March 28 was 9,114.
While the discrepancy wasnt large, it was fodder for critics questioning the governments ability and ambition to increase testing, particularly after it emerged that Germany would be testing around 70,000 a day .
When the outbreak first hit the U.K. in late February, the country quickly carved out a place for itself as a testing leader, implementing robust testing and contact-tracing, while supplementing those tactics with broader surveillance focused on ICUs and primary care sites.
But as the number of cases continued to grow, the strategy changed. On March 12, Englands Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said that it was “no longer needed for us to identify every case” and that the country would move to mainly testing those in hospitals with symptoms.
Experts and the public alike pointed out that this tactic seemed to contradict the World Health Organization (WHO)s repeated calls for widespread testing and contact-tracing.
As Singapore and South Korea emerged as countries where extensive testing and contact-tracing seemed to be working, Whitty defended the U.K.s “targeted approach” while promising that testing would indeed increase.
It was only on March 17 that the governments chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, admitted that the U.K. “simply [does] not have mass testing available for the population now.”
In an email sent as late as March 22 and seen by London Playbook , a senior Downing Street aide asked U.K. research institutes if the government could borrow machines required to carry out COVID-19 tests.
