600 UK labs could have helped testing in early stages of crisis
HUNDREDS of laboratories were capable of helping Public Health England carry out coronavirus tests early in the crisis even though the body claimed just a handful were equipped to deal with such a dangerous disease.
PHE has been repeatedly criticised for failing to ramp up testing early on.
Yvonne Doyle, the PHE director of health protection, and Prof John Newton, the leader of the UK Covid-19 testing programme, consistently claimed there were not enough category 3 labs to deal with a virus as infectious as coronavirus. They said that although there had been many offers of help, they had to wait until the Health and Safety Executive allowed coronavirus to be handled by category 2 labs.
The Sunday Telegraph has found there are around 600 category 3 labs in Britain, including 150 in universities.
Earlier this month, Dr Doyle told
MPs at the science and technology select committee: “The reason why every laboratory was not able to engage in this immediately was that this was a novel virus, it was treated as a dangerous pathogen and it was therefore categorised as category level 3 and that meant that very few laboratories initially could do that. We made an application to reduce the level so more laboratories could come on stream.
“On March 1, the Health and Safety Executive granted that permission and then that allowed many more laboratories to engage in this.”
However, Andrew Griffith, the Tory MP, pointed out that world class labs at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University and The Francis Crick Institute were ignored for weeks after offering their services even after the reclassification had happened.
Prof Matthew Freeman, head of the Oxford lab, said despite many offers and approaches he had still not been contacted by the end of March.
When The Telegraph highlighted the number of category 3 labs, a PHE spokesman said officials were concerned they would not be able to carry out mass testing.
Yet in mid-February, PHE was itself only able to examine around “a couple of hundred” samples daily, so even if each of the 600 extra labs could have helped with one test, it would have increased capacity threefold. Prof Newton told MPs that all offers of help were passed to the Department of Health, but not all labs meet three tests set out by the Government.
“Some laboratories were invited to contribute but some weren’t able to because the third test was whether they could provide an end-to-end clinical service associated with the NHS and most laboratories were not in a position to do that,” he said.
Britain has been heavily criticised for abandoning community testing on March 13 while other countries, which achieved a lower death toll, continued to trace contacts and cut off routes of transmission for the virus.