Experts say random tests not enough to lockdown regions

THE testing programme is not fit for purpose to allow regional lockdowns, the vice-president of the Royal College of Pathologists has warned in an attack on government policy.

As test and trace rolled out, Dr Rachael Liebmann warned that the experts in the field had not been properly consulted throughout the pandemic and ministers “should not be reducing our specialities down to random tests”.

She said that the testing strategy still had a number of issues, including capacity and results from privatised labs not being shared with healthcare professionals.

Dr Liebmann warned that starting a system when it was not ready could do more harm than good. The Government is pinning its hopes on testing and tracing those who have coronavirus and their contacts. But leading doctors and scientists have warned that the tests will not provide the data needed to make policy decisions such as targeted lockdowns of regions or whether extra capacity is required.

The majority of tests are being carried out by the Lighthouse Labs network, which does not feed the results into NHS databases, so the results are not available for GPS or hospitals.

“The Government needs to make its public health decisions based on credible scientific data, and not knee-jerk reactions,” Dr Liebmann said. The data that these labs collect was in some cases “pretty minimal”, said Allun Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science.

In order to do a “population-based test to decide who should be quarantined or what areas should be quarantined” they would need to carry out an “inconceivable” 40million PCR tests, showing whether a person currently has Covid-19, Dr Liebmann said.