PHE declined help from top external labs

PUBLIC Health England knew it did not have the necessary coronavirus testing capacity in February but did not allow help from outside laboratories for weeks, the Commons Science and Technology Committee has heard.

Prof Yvonne Doyle, PHE’S medical director, said widespread testing and contact tracing was stopped on March 12 so that hospitals would still have access to tests as numbers rapidly increased.

She said PHE had just seven laboratories and had been unable to continue testing in the community despite calls from the World Health Organisation to “test, test, test”. The Government’s testing co-ordinator, Prof John Newton, who is also PHE’S director of health improvement, said the testing plans were abandoned after a million cases of Covid-19 were predicted across the UK.

Prof Doyle said: “We knew that, if this epidemic continued to increase, we would certainly need more capacity ... and that was the basis of the decision to contain capacity for where it was needed.”

But Andrew Griffith MP questioned why some of Britain’s best scientists operating top laboratories, such as Oxford University’s Dunn School of Pathology, had been ignored when they had offered to help with testing.

Prof Newton said requests were passed on to the Department of Health.

Sir Paul Nurse, chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute, said it had offered to help with testing early on in the epidemic but it had been weeks before the institute’s offer was accepted.