Our response to PHE

Last week this newspaper revealed that Britain gave up on routine testing on March 12 because Public Health England could only cope with testing and tracing contacts of five Covid-19 cases a week, with modelling suggesting it might be able to raise this to 50 cases. PHE has subsequently published a post on its website that questions the accuracy of The Telegraph’s reporting. We stand by it entirely. They have tried to undermine our story with a series of semantic objections, none of which stands up to scrutiny.

They claim, falsely, that the article confused testing for coronavirus with contact tracing; we simply did not. PHE says that we wrote that all contact tracing was abandoned; again, this is totally incorrect, as we stated that the Government gave up on “routine” testing and tracing. PHE rejects our statement that there was a “desperate initial shortage of capacity” to test and trace and says it went on to contact 5,000 people in the containment phase – but, again, we made it quite clear, by use of the word “initial” that we were talking about the early stage of the crisis. And, to repeat, at that “initial” stage PHE could only cope with five – maybe 50 – new cases a week, yet on the day routine test and trace was abandoned, Britain gained 421 new cases.

Today we can reveal that efforts to end the lockdown were hampered by PHE’s failure to embark on mass surveillance testing, that PHE might have misled Boris Johnson when asked about testing, and that despite PHE’s claim there was only a handful of labs qualified to handle testing for Covid-19, hundreds of such labs were in fact capable of doing just that. We stand by our belief that PHE is not fit for purpose.