‘Winning with 1,000 tests-a-minute’
ALMOST 1,000 people are being swabbed for coronavirus every minute, NHS Test and Trace boss Dido Harding has revealed.
Baroness Harding said the system is having a “material” impact in bringing down infection rates in high-risk areas.
And she claimed the R-rate – the rate at which a Covid sufferer infects others – could come down by as much as 0.8 by March due to contact tracing.
She told the Commons Public Accounts Committee: “Every minute yesterday 965 people were swabbed or swabbing themselves throughout the day.
“In the first two weeks of the new year, we’ve tested over 7.5 million people. In the last week of published data – so the first week of January – our contact tracers reached a million people, both people who tested positive and their close contacts.
“That translates into 198 people-aminute successfully contact traced during every minute of the working day, seven days a week.”
The Tory peer said Test and Trace was lowering the R number by 0.3 and 0.6 and, in high prevalence areas, between 0.5 and 0.8.The results were also being analysed by Government to inform future decisions. Baroness Harding went on to reveal plans for mass testing in English schools have to be adjusted to address new variants.
She said: “It’s still very much in the sort of pilot and evaluation stage. “Since those pilots that we ran in the autumn the new variant has emerged, and we have much higher rates of infection.”
She defended the cost of the programme’s £1million-a-day outlay on 900 consultants, adding: “We couldn’t have built the service without that.”