The 44 British labs we should be using

A FORMER director of the World Health Organisation says the UK has 44 labs capable of mass testing which are not being properly used.

Professor Anthony Costello also criticised Public Health England for being ‘slow and controlled’ in its approach to testing. He said PHE – the Government’s health protection agency – allowed other labs in universities and private organisations to carry out testing only two weeks ago, when the epidemic was well under way.

Professor Costello suggested that if these 44 labs were used to their full capacity, the UK’s testing rate would be on a par with Germany’s.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Professor Costello said a policy of mass community testing was essential to detect coronavirus hotspots and eventually end the lockdown.

He said: ‘When we want to loosen up the lockdown, we want to have the control over that. By mass testing we will be able to detect new outbreaks and there will be much less disruption if we can do that rather than isolating the whole economy.

‘In answer to “can we do it?” – we have 44 molecular virology labs in the UK. If they were doing 400 tests a day, we would be up to Germany levels of testing and that is perfectly feasible.

‘PHE were slow and controlled and only allowed non-PHE labs to start testing two weeks ago. If you look at Korea, they have done 490,000 tests. Their death rate is three per million and they have suppressed the virus. I don’t see why we can’t get these 44 labs up and running, finding cases and testing.

‘We must go to mass testing and when we remove the lockdown – I don’t think it will take six months, in all the Asian states it was six to eight weeks, even in Wuhan – then we will have a control mechanism which will enable us to wait, without socially distancing the whole country, and wait until we can get drugs or a vaccine.’