As second virus wave builds, Britain enters new testing crisis
UNPROCESSED SAMPLES OVERWHELM LABS AS PEOPLE WAIT IN DESPERATION
With Britons fretting last week that a new sixperson limit on gatherings would effectively cancel Christmas, Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled what he called Operation Moonshot, an audacious plan to test 10 million people every day for the coronavirus and restore life to normal by winter.
But by Tuesday, the reality of earthbound life in a pandemic reasserted itself: Before a second wave of the virus had even crested, unprocessed samples overwhelmed Britain’s labs and people waited in desperation for tests while the reopening of the country’s schools and businesses hung in the balance.
The country cannot meet the current demand, yet the prime minister plans, within a few months, to conduct more than 40 times as much testing as it does now.
Perfect storm
“We are sleepwalking into a second surge of the pandemic without really having learnt the lessons from the first,” said Dr. Rinesh Parmar, an anaesthesiologist and the chairman of The Doctors’ Association UK, an advocacy and professional group. “We are set for a perfect storm of problems heading into the winter.”
Britain has suffered more coronavirus-related deaths — 57,528, according to official records compiled from death certificates — than any other nation in Europe. But as new cases receded over the summer, Johnson’s government created incentives for people to dine out, urged them to return to their offices and dithered over whether to require face masks before mandating them in midJuly for enclosed spaces.
Crucially, experts said, the government also failed to prepare the country’s labs for an inevitable spike in demand for tests as schools reopened in September. Confirmed new cases in Britain, which had fallen below 600 a day in early July, have reached about 3,000 a day.
The testing programme is so saturated that it has started sending overflow samples to labs in Italy and Germany. On Monday, people in England’s 10 riskiest coronavirus hot spots, including Manchester, were unable to book tests. Some people were told they would have to travel 200 miles to get tested.
The programme recently reached a backlog of 185,000 swabs, The Sunday Times of London reported this weekend.