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The
UK should have ramped up
Coronavirus testing sooner and may have pursued similar tracing strategies to
Germany and
South Korea had it had the capacity, government scientists have suggested.
Chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance told the Commons health committee it would have been “beneficial” to have “lots of testing” sooner in the outbreak.
That could have allowed the UK to pursue a similar test, track and trace approach to those seen in countries where there have been far fewer deaths, deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries suggested.
The government is only now putting in place a test, track and trace programme after health secretary Matt Hancock boosted Covid-19 testing capacity to more than 100,000.Germany, which has had just under 7,000 coronavirus deaths, and South Korea, which has had just 254, have been praised for testing, tracking and tracing from early stages in the outbreak.
But the UK, which has the highest death rate in Europe with 32,375 confirmed Covid-19 fatalities, has meanwhile been criticised for abandoning community testing on March 12.
Under enormous public pressure, Hancock on April 2 then announced plans to ramp up testing to 100,000 a day, achieving the target on Thursday and Friday but then dipping below again for the next two days.
Harries was asked whether it was right to stop community testing in the middle of March.
She said a balance needed to be struck in terms of testing and boosting capacity in the NHS.
“If we had unlimited capacity, and the ongoing support beyond that, then we perhaps would choose a slightly different approach,” she told the committee. “But with the resources that we had – and I mean that in a broad sense, because many of the specialists and expertise that you need to carry out additional contact tracing will also be supporting the other changes that have been very successful, for example ramping up NHS capacity...
“So there are clinicians working on the interface between public health and the NHS, and it’s appropriate that capacity is maximised to save lives, I think, as well as considering the spread of disease.”
She added: “There is a balance point in this with resources that you have available.”
Vallance meanwhile conceded the UK should have boosted testing capacity sooner in the outbreak.
“I think that probably we, in the early phases, and I’ve said this before, I think if we’d managed to ramp testing capacity quicker it would have been beneficial.
“And, you know, for all sorts of reasons that didn’t happen.
“I think it’s clear you need lots of testing for this, but to echo what Jenny Harries has said, it’s completely wrong to think of testing as the answer.
“It’s just part of the system that you need to get right. The entire system needs to work properly.”
Vallance also revealed that the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) discussed testing capacity as far back as its first meeting on January 22.
Asked why Sage did not model what would have happened to death rates if the UK did not go for a full test, track and trace approach at the outset of the epidemic, Vallance said: “We absolutely right from the first meeting and at multiple meetings throughout January and February raised the point of testing capacity and the importance of testing.
“In the very first meeting on the 22nd I think we raised it and pretty much at every meeting thereafter we discussed testing and tracking.”Related... The UK Now Has The Highest Number Of Confirmed Coronavirus Deaths In Europe One-Metre Social Distancing Up To ’30 Times’ Riskier Than Two-Metres, Says Chief Scientist Coronavirus Antibody Tests Could See People Deliberately Infect Themselves, Government Warned