U.K. slow to rev up virus testing

Government takes heat after promises to do more unkept

LONDON — When Prime Minister Boris Johnson developed a cough and fever, he got a test for the new coronavirus. Most other Britons won’t be offered one.

Johnson’s Conservative government was under fire Wednesday for failing to keep its promise to increase the amount of testing being done for covid-19, even as the country had its biggest day-to-day rise yet in deaths among people with the virus, raising the total to 2,352.

The issue has become an incipient political crisis for Johnson, who has mild symptoms and is working from isolation in the prime minister’s No. 10 Downing St. apartment.

Richard Horton, editor of medical journal The Lancet, said Britain’s handling of the covid-19 crisis was “the most serious science policy failure in a generation.”

In a tweet, he noted that England’s deputy chief medical officer said last week that “‘there comes a point in a pandemic where that [testing] is not an appropriate intervention.”

“Now [testing is] a priority,” Horton said. “Public message: utter confusion.”

Like some other countries, the U.K. has restricted testing to hospitalized patients, leaving people with milder symptoms unsure whether they have had the virus. Many scientists say wider testing — especially of health care personnel — would allow medics who are off work with symptoms to return if they are negative.

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick conceded Wednesday that “we do need to go further and we need to do that faster.”

The U.K. initially performed about 5,000 tests a day, but the government promised to increase that number to 10,000 by the end of last week and to 25,000 by mid-April. The target has been elusive. On Wednesday, the government said 9,793 tests had been performed in the previous 24 hours, the highest daily total yet.

Critics contrast the U.K. with Germany, which reacted quickly as reports of the new respiratory virus emerged from China at the end of last year. It began producing a test for covid-19 in January, weeks before the U.K. Germany now has the capacity to do 500,000 tests a week.

Jenrick said the U.K.’s test tally should hit 15,000 a day “within a couple of days” and 25,000 a day in a couple of weeks.

The government says testing front-line health care workers is a priority — however only 2,000 have been tested so far, from a National Health Service workforce of more than 1 million.

British officials blame shortages of swabs to take samples and of chemicals known as reagents, which are needed to perform the tests, for the delay in ramping up testing.

“There is a massive demand for raw materials and commercial kits — this is not unique to the U.K. — and many places no longer have stock of essential reagents,” said Stephen Baker, professor of molecular microbiology at the University of Cambridge.

The United States has also struggled to boost its testing capacity. A test produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had early reliability problems, and there were delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity. U.S. testing is now growing rapidly, but varies widely from state to state.

British officials defend their record at developing and deploying a test for covid-19. They also say that while too little testing is a weakness, so is too much, because testing vast numbers of healthy people would be wasteful.

In Britain, about 20% of tests have been positive, suggesting a substantial number of cases are being missed.