Hancock hails test-and-trace as ‘success’ but gives no number

MATT HANCOCK last night insisted the NHS test-and-trace system has been “successful” but would not give a number for how many people had been contacted.

The NHS service launched on May 28 in England, with 25,000 contact tracing staff.

Ministers believe it holds the key to further easing of the lockdown, however, the Government has not disclosed how many people have been contacted so far.

The Health Secretary told yesterday’s Downing Street press conference the system was “up and running”. He added: “The level of incidence of disease has come down and so actually we have more capacity than we need; this is a good thing.”

Mr Hancock added: “The number of contacts is a bit lower than we were expecting, which implies that people are following the social distancing rules and are not coming into contact with large numbers of people.”

It came as NHS trusts were given two days’ notice to carry out thousands of antibody tests ahead of the Government’s target to boost testing capacity to 200,000, it has emerged.

On Sunday health officials said capacity had reached 205,634 a day earlier.

It has now emerged NHS England and Improvement wrote to health service leaders last Wednesday – when the UK had capacity for 161,000 tests.

Regions were typically told to deliver around 6,000 tests each, in order to boost capacity by 40,000 in 48 hours.

Antibody tests aim to establish whether a person has previously had the virus. However, it is currently not known how much immunity is conferred, or for how long.

One NHS head of pathology told Health Service Journal: “There is one obvious answer as to why there is

‘The number of test-and-trace contacts is lower than we expected’

suddenly such an urgency to roll this out. There is nothing meaningful we can do with this test data at the moment.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “Antibody tests have always contributed to the daily capacity figure and it is misleading to suggest they have been rushed out to hit a target.

“We are rolling out millions of antibody tests to help us to better understand the level and duration of immunity and how the virus is spreading across the country.”