More questions over government’s strategy as second ‘mega-lab’ opens to boost capacity
The government has hailed the opening of its second ‘mega-lab’ for coronavirus testing, but the country is still carrying out an order of magnitude fewer tests than prime minister has Boris Johnson promised.
On 19 March Johnson promised to ramp up capacity from 5,000 to 250,000 tests a day at some point, but the latest figures show that the number of daily tests is only around 21,000.
An interim target of 25,000 daily tests by mid-April was also missed while meeting another target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April looks increasingly unlikely.
As a major part of the drive to get to the 100,000 target, the government has pledged to set up three mega-labs to process large numbers of tests collected from a network of drive-through testing stations. The second of these was launched on 20 April in Alderley Park.
But serious concerns have already been expressed about these labs.
“We have not been involved in assuring the quality of the testing centres and are now being kept at arm’s length from their processes, even when they exist close to large NHS laboratories,” said the president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, Allan Wilson, last week.
He added that the tests were “delivered mainly by volunteer unregistered staff in unaccredited laboratories that have been established within a few weeks”.
Alongside the race for a vaccine against Covid-19, testing has emerged as the crucial issue for exiting the lockdown that has shut down vast parts of the UK economy.
Anthony Costello, of UCL’s Institute for Global Health, told MPs on 17 April testing strategies had to go beyond merely increasing the laboratory capacity.
“If we’re going to suppress the chain of transmission of this virus in the next stage…we need to make sure that we have a system in place that can not just do a certain number of tests in the laboratory, but has a system at district and community level…to test people rapidly in the community,” he told the House of Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee.
The government seemed to abandon community testing on 12 March, only to go back to it days later and has struggled ever since to get the numbers up. It also bought millions of antibody tests which later turned out not to be accurate enough.
One of the MPs sitting in on the hearing, Greg Clark, has demanded the publication of the report that informed the government’s initial choice to reject decentralised testing.
“It was nearly four weeks ago when Sharon Peacock [Public Health England’s National Infection Service Interim Director] committed that she would do that; it is important that we should be able to see it,” said Clark.
Health secretary Matt Hancock has promised to look into the issue and that the government is on track to reach the 100,000 tests a day target.