Councils ‘won’t have enough contact tracers’

Government not planning to give authorities extra resources for door-to-door tracking, minister says

COUNCILS may not have enough contact tracers to knock on doors, a public health chief has warned, as more failings in the test and trace operation came to light.

Earlier this week, the NHS said local authorities would be encouraged to send out their own workers to chase up contacts of infected coronavirus cases who fail to respond after research showed call centre staff were reaching just one case a month.

Virus hotspots such as Blackburn and Leicester took matters into their own hands amid failings, but the president of the Association of Directors of Public Health said more resources were needed to deliver it nationally.

Jeanelle de Gruchy told Today on BBC Radio 4: “I think this is an evolution of the system … it’s fantastic that the Government is recognising the value of local government, which is rooted in the community and the importance of this for the test and trace programme.”

But she added that “resources to deliver it will be an issue because we are being asked to do a lot more”.

Edward Argar, the health minister, said the Government was not planning to give councils extra resources for the new system because they had already received billions of pounds.

Yesterday it emerged that contact tracers failed to get in touch with more than 40 per cent of people who live in the same household as those infected, in a finding branded “bizarre” by statisticians. Just 57 per cent of contacts who live with a person testing positive for Covid-19 were reached by call centres – 4,339 out of 7,589. In contrast, tracers tracked down 67 per cent of outside contacts – 3,137 out of 4,690.

Prof Sheila Bird, formerly the MRC Biostatistics Unit programme leader at Cambridge University, said the poor performance of track and trace in contacting infected households was “extraordinary

and needed explanation”. Prof Bird said it was crucial to contact households with infected people as they were most likely to have contracted the virus.

“We need to do randomly timed visits to assess the risk of being asymptomatic but swab-test positive and to check on adherence to stay-home instruction,” she said.

The NHS said contact tracers often asked cases themselves to advise their household members to self-isolate.

“This results in these contacts not being recorded as reached and asked to self-isolate, which is likely a contributing factor for a lower proportion of household contacts being reached in comparison to non-household contacts,” a statement said.

However, most recent figures show that contact tracing has got worse with, on average, only 2.8 contacts reached per positive case, down from an average of 3.4 in the previous two weeks.

The Government claimed many people did not answer the phone because they mistook the 0300 number for cold callers.

But Prof Bird said: “Has it really taken nine weeks to discover the 0300 number as a potential barrier? Problems should have been discovered early by follow-up visits.”

Boris Johnson told MPS on May 20 the test and trace operation would be “world-beating” and in place by June 1.

But this week, the Government said it would axe 6,000 national contract tracers and create a “hybrid system” with national callers alongside a local door-to-door approach.

Mr Argar told Today: “We have reached in the past 10 weeks, since this was set up, pretty much from scratch, around a quarter of a million people – that’s a quarter of a million chains of transmission that have been broken by this. But for those hard to reach or for those people who can’t be contacted then you’ve got this door-to-door approach as well.”

Labour said the Government was too quick to outsource the test and trace contract to Serco.

Justin Madders, the shadow health minister, added: “This is yet another example of the Government being too slow to tackle Covid-19 and too quick to hand out juicy contracts to the private sector.”

The Unite union said a “new lucrative contract for Serco” should be scrapped and the cash given to local councils.

Baroness Harding, the NHS test and trace chairman, said the new system followed “successful trials in a small number of local areas”.