Want a test for Covid? Catch travel bug first
Call me picky but suggesting that someone who may have coronavirus but not a car should travel 85 miles for a test is ridiculous.
That is what happened last week when people who live in Telford, Shropshire, were sent to a testing centre in Oldham, Greater Manchester, because there was no capacity closer.
Hours after I heard this, one of my colleagues tweeted that constituents in Oldham seeking tests were being directed to a test centre in – you guessed it – Telford.
It is a perfect example of the debacle of the Government’s test, track and trace system.
Good job it is nothing important – imagine if this level of incompetence was happening in the middle of a global crisis!
On top of the threat to health, the pandemic has left children out of school, businesses faltering and mental health issues rising.
Without exception, there is not one of these secondary problems that would not be eased or solved completely by a decent test, track, trace and isolate system.
As we hope and wait for a vaccine, greater testing has meant places like Germany and South Korea have been able to restart normal life with far fewer problems.
Surely the Government should have been more prepared – knowing that there might be a need for extra capacity. Instead
what happened was that the whole system fell over.
Many children have gone back to school for a matter of hours, only to be told that one person in their class, or teacher in their school, had tested positive and so they would now need to remain at home for another two weeks.
Parents across my constituency and the country got in touch to say that they were being told to take weeks off work, or to get a series of tests to prove that they were safe.
But they couldn’t get a test unless they drove from Kent to Cornwall or something similar.
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock MP, came out swinging from this crisis, somehow blaming too many people trying to get a test when they didn’t need one.
Then, within 24 hours, the Prime Minister was back on our screens – for this season’s revamped daily corona briefing – talking about how mass testing was the way we were going to solve this crisis.
I shall take comfort in the fact that at least the Government’s messaging is as consistent and accurate as their system of allocating test centres.
The constant errors with testing, tracing and the inability to isolate the cases to small manageable areas, is excluding kids from school and leaving people without wages.
Getting the test, track and trace system running properly – and understanding people’s actual lives – must be the absolute priority.
Otherwise
I shall look forward to my inevitable trip up to
Oldham.
I guess it would be nice to get away.