FIX TESTING FIASCO NOW
REVEALED: Thousands of vital UK kits sent abroad ++ Dozens of British test labs wasted ++ As deaths soar and healthy boy of 13 dies, Mail demands ministers...
MINISTERS have been told to get a grip on mass testing after Britain’s darkest day of the pandemic. The daily death toll doubled yesterday as coronavirus claimed another 381 lives.
Among the victims were 28 who had no prior health issues, including a boy of 13 from south London. The total death toll now stands at 1,789.
The Government is under attack for failing to ramp up its testing quickly enough – only 8,240 patients were screened over the past 24 hours.
Today the Mail reveals that a British firm is selling kits to 80 countries, including India. Novacyt said a shortage of NHS testing facilities had prevented further UK sales. Separately, a former World Health Organisation chief said the Government’s health protection agency had been ‘slow’ over testing and that 44 labs were underused.
No 10 admitted its target of carrying out 25,000 tests a day might not be hit until May. Ministers had previously implied they would have reached this rate already, while NHS officials suggested a target of three weeks.
Michael Gove last night blamed the fiasco on a critical shortage of chemical reagents used to detect viruses. But Jeremy Hunt said it was ‘very worrying’
that the Government had assumed the ship had ‘sailed for mass community testing’. The ex-health secretary added: ‘However difficult it is to source the reagents, ramp up the capacity of laboratories, it is essential that mass community testing is part of our national strategy.’
As the NHS’s medical director said the number of new cases seemed to be stabilising:
No 10 insisted it was OK to shop more than once a week contrary to suggestions from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps;
Ministers are planning to release an app to alert mobile users to nearby virus victims;
Police who used drones to spy on dog walkers at beauty spots insisted they were only trying to save lives;
British Airways suspended all flights to and from Gatwick following a collapse in demand;
Up to £200million worth of plants are expected to be destroyed by closed garden centres;
MPs demanded a crackdown on banks after business owners were told to risk their homes and savings to secure loans;
Global coronavirus cases rose to 823,566 with 40,643 deaths.
Matt Hancock last night intervened to end the embarrassing situation in which the number of tests carried out is short of capacity. A source said the Health Secretary had scrapped a rule that 85 per cent of tests were reserved for patients, regardless of how many needed testing.
The rule meant that although the NHS could screen 10,949 people on Sunday only 8,278 were tested and the remaining capacity could not be diverted for use on key staff.
Mr Gove said the Government needed to ‘ go further, faster’ after being challenged on why Germany was able to carry out seven times our number of tests each day.
Andy Burnham, a former health secretary and now Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, said ministers had implied they would have hit 25,000 tests a day by now.
He added: ‘Widespread testing is a crucial weapon in the fight against this virus, both in terms of stopping its spread in the community, reassuring the public and getting frontline staff back to work.
‘We need a national effort to help the Government hit its testing targets and that needs to start now.’
Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran said: ‘The Government needs to move faster on this; mass testing will help reduce the spread of the virus, better protect the key workers who are putting their lives on the line, and help the economy by allowing those who have had the virus to come out of isolation.’
Testing is particularly important for NHS staff as many are self-isolating for up to 14 days when either themselves or family members have virus symptoms.
The Government began screening healthcare workers only last weekend starting with just 900 individuals, a fraction of the 550,000 hospital doctors, GPs, nurses and ambulance staff.
The Royal College of Physicians has claimed a quarter of hospital doctors are in quarantine or off sick while nursing leaders say their figure is around one in five.
Many of these front-line staff and their families will not have coronavirus and a negative test would allow them to return to work immediately.
Germany is carrying out 70,000 tests a day and plans to ramp this number up even further while South Korea have been doing 20,000 a day for weeks.
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