Community Covid-19 testing ended on March 12 – and other government failures
This is just to remind you that the Tories actually stopped testing for Covid-19 in mid-March.
If they had kept it up, the UK might have been in a better position to handle the pandemic.
As it is, they’re still struggling to hit a target of 100,000 tests a day after being kicked in the backside to get testing again. As for the target for the end of May – 200,000 per day – no chance!
That’s just one catastrophic blunder that the Commons’ own Science and Technology Committee has raised with Boris Johnson.
Here’s the lot:
The Government’s coronavirus testing capacity has been “inadequate” throughout the pandemic, the committee said.
The World Health Organisation was warning about the need to test as early as February, but widespread testing in the UK ended on March 12 due to lack of capacity.
Care home residents and workers weren’t routinely tested until April 15 – by which time the virus was rampant.
Public Health England (PHE) has still not provided the evidence it used for that decision.
The approach to dealing with asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 was “unclear”… despite evidence suggesting a “high proportion” of people with Covid-19 – as high as 80%, said one witness – have no symptoms at all. It would mean needing to test regularly in hospitals and care homes even where workers do not feel ill.
There is no transparency over what the advice of SAGE is – whether in the form of its actual advice to Ministers, minutes of its meetings, or even a summary, suitable for publication, of its advice.
Without visibility of the scientific advice it will be difficult to corroborate the Government’s assertion that it always follows the scientific advice.
Source: Coronavirus: 5 failings unveiled in powerful letter to Boris Johnson – Mirror Online
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