Officials ‘could only cope with five Covid cases a week’
BRITAIN’S disastrous decision to abandon testing for coronavirus occurred because health systems could only cope with five cases a week, official documents show.
Newly released papers from Sage (the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) show routine testing and tracing of contacts was stopped because Public Health England’s systems were struggling to deal with a handful of cases.
At a meeting on Feb 18, advisers said PHE could only cope with testing and tracing contacts of five Covid-19 cases a week, with modelling suggesting it might only be possible to increase this to 50 cases. Advisers then agreed it was “sensible” to shift to stopping routine testing, despite acknowledging that such a decision would “generate a public reaction”.
The decision to give up on testing those with symptoms of coronavirus is now seen as the key reason the UK has the highest death rates in Europe.
Over the next month the Government will roll out a national contact tracing scheme, 14 weeks after officials raised the country’s poor readiness for such a scheme.
England is now recording around 8,000 new cases of Covid-19 a day and the NHS “test and trace” system is promising to warn up to 10,000 people a day that they have been near someone who has tested positive.
The end of routine testing in the UK came on March 12, when Boris Johnson announced that anyone with symptoms of coronavirus should simply stay at home for a week. On this day the UK recorded 421 new cases.
However, after the virus raged uncontrolled through the UK that month, ministers were forced back to nationwide testing, announcing a “five pillar” plan on April 2, which finally led to a nationwide tracing service launched this week.
A desperate initial shortage of capacity to test and trace is detailed among 51 papers released on Friday, including minutes of 34 meetings, which occurred from Jan 22 to May 7. They reveal the crucial decisions which led to the disastrous decision to abandon routine testing – which is only now being ramped back up.
Minutes of a key Sage meeting on Feb 18 state: “Currently PHE can cope with five new cases a week (requiring isolation of 800 contacts). Modelling suggests this capacity could be increased to 50 new cases a week (8,000 contact isolations) but this assumption needs to be stress tested with PHE operational colleagues.”
Sage concluded: “When there is sustained transmission in the UK, contact tracing will no longer be useful.”
Two days later, Sage’s scientists agreed that plans drawn up for PHE on discontinuing contact tracing are “sensible”, the minutes show.
“Any decision to discontinue contact tracing will generate a public reaction – which requires consideration with input from behavioural scientists,” the minutes of February 20 note.
Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical
Officer for England, suggested the nation would abandon routine testing on March 5, in part because there was now a “slim to zero” chance of avoiding a global pandemic.
Jenny Harries, England’s deputy chief medical officer, later claimed abandoning testing was a policy choice because “there comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention”. The Government’s consistent position at the time was that they were following scientific advice.
However, the World Health Organisation said countries were not doing enough to test and isolate cases. At the same time, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged countries to “test, test, test.” As the pandemic took hold across the world, Germany was carrying out 50,000 tests a day at a point when Britain could only manage 5,000.
Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, has said the decision to abandon testing and tracing will rank as one of the “biggest failures of scientific advice to ministers in our lifetimes”. This month Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, singled out the failure to ramp up testing as one of the key errors in Britain’s handling of the crisis.
The Government has since come under fire for a litany of testing failures, and criticism for repeatedly missed targets to carry out 100,000 tests a day.
Last night, PHE said it was certain it had capacity to track and trace more than five cases at the time of the minutes from the Sage meeting. A spokeswoman was unable to clarify whether it would have been able to cope with 50 cases outlined in the Sage modelling.
“The model used an assumption of five importation events per week in the initial phase,” a PHE spokeswoman said. “This means five imported cases and subsequent cases that may arise as a consequence of those imported cases; the modelling considered the associated contacts for both. Modelling stated that the number of contacts could be managed by PHE.” A Government spokesman said: “We have launched NHS Test and Trace, to keep this virus under control and save lives, while carefully and safely lifting the lockdown.
“Local councils have plans in place to respond to Covid-19. To support the rollout of NHS Test and Trace, we asked all councils to extend their existing plans into dedicated Local Outbreak Plans by the end of June. Last week we gave all councils £300 million to support cthem to do all they can to make Test and Trace a success.
“We now have the 25,000 tracers we need to help control the virus, and hope the public will do their bit to keep the infection rate down.”