One day soon, a Mastermind contestant will do a round on “the life and lies of Boris Johnson”.

There will be a lot of material from which to choose questions. This Writer is thinking of running a daily column. I’ve already got another piece lined up.

This case concerns the following claim, made on June 3:

“We already turn around 90% of tests within 48 hours. The tests conducted at the 199 testing centres, as well as the mobile test centres, are all done within 24 hours, and I can undertake to him now to get all tests turned around in 24 hours by the end of June, except for difficulties with postal tests or insuperable problems like that.”

The claim was – of course – untrue, as Full Fact explains:

When this was said, on 3 June, 19 per cent of tests at regional testing sites and five per cent of tests at mobile test centres were done within 24 hours.

In fact, it turns out that even by the end of June – four weeks later – the government was still failing to turn around every test within 24 hours.

Here‘s the Mirror:

NHS Test and Trace data shows that in the final week of the month only around a quarter of tests carried out at hospitals and care homes were turned around this quickly.

When it came to tests at regional drive through and mobile testing sites nine out of ten tests saw results delivered on time.

Turning around times for home testing performed even worse with just 2% of people getting results in 24 hours.

You may be wondering why the 24-hour turnaround is important. Here’s the reason:

The 24 hour target is key to allowing tracers to get hold of contacts before they start spreading the virus to others.

So one lie leads to another. When Johnson says his contact tracing projects are running at 100 per cent efficiency, you’ll already know it isn’t true.

And of course this means the Tories aren’t controlling Covid-19 – no matter what they say in their press conferences.

Source: New data reveals PM’s testing speeds claims as wrong – Full Fact