Test numbers have DROPPED 4,000 in 4 days

... so after his very public pledge of 100,000 tests by the end of the month, we launch a daily reminder for Health Secretary

COrONAvIrUS testing numbers have fallen in recent days as the Government’s target of checking 100,000 people a day by the end of the month looks in doubt.

Fewer than 15,000 tests were conducted on Monday, with little more than two weeks to go until the daily target must be met at the end of April.

Although there were 19,100 tests last Thursday, that figure fell to 18,000 on Saturday and then dropped again.

The figures were published after Sir Patrick vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, admitted Britain was too slow to put mass testing in place when the scale of the pandemic became clear.

He said testing started well but was not ‘scaled’ quickly enough. Some 2,486 of the 14,982 tests completed on Monday were processed through the drive-through testing programme for NHS staff. Another 415 were done by the ‘surveillance’ programme run by Porton Down, and 12,081 were conducted in NHS hospitals.

Despite the poor performance, Sir Patrick said he was confident the 100,000 target, set by Health Secretary Matt Hancock, would be hit. Speaking on ITv’s Coronavirus QA broadcast on Monday, Sir Patrick said Public Health England had ‘ got off to a good start’ by trying to ‘ make sure they caught people coming into the country’.

But once it had become clear the virus was circulating freely here, testing was ‘ not scaled as fast as it needs to scale’.

Asked why Germany – which is testing more than 70,000 people a day – had done so well and kept its death toll relatively low, Sir Patrick said: ‘Testing is an important part of how we need to manage this.

‘It was something that we raised at the beginning, and we need to get more testing, and that’s happening at the moment.’ But he said there were ‘ all sorts of reasons’ why Germany’s death toll was low, pointing to ‘concentration of people in cities, demographics, age, structures of populations... I don’t think it’s as simple to say lots of testing saves lives.’

Helen Ward, professor of public health at Imperial College London, said ‘politicians refused to listen to advice’ on testing. In a post on Twitter, she said: ‘We said lockdown earlier, we said test, trace, isolate.

‘But they decided they knew better. There will be a reckoning, and it will not be forgiving.’ Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said she was ‘confident’ the test target would be met. Downing Street said a new ‘mega-lab’ a Manchester has now joined a Milton Keynes testing lab opened last week; another in Glasgow opens this week.

The Prime Minister’s spokesman said a new lab, being set up by AstraZeneca, GSK and the University of Cambridge, ‘aims to carry out 30,000 tests a day’.

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