Coronavirus: Government condemned by health experts for ‘shambolic’ testing system as fury mounts over failings

Ministers facing growing criticism over testing programme, once described as ‘world-beating’ by Boris Johnson

The government’s national testing system has been condemned as “shambolic” by public health experts, who argue that the UK “missed a great opportunity” to suppress the prevalence of Covid-19 as a result of the service’s shortcomings.

Ministers are facing growing fury over the testing programme – once described as “world-beating” by prime minister Boris Johnson – amid reports that people have been unable to get hold of tests or are being told to travel hundreds of miles to a testing centre.

In recent weeks, the government's coronavirus test booking service has advised residents in London to travel to Wales and those in Cumbria to head to Scotland.

One member of the public said he had been forced to make a near-500 mile journey to get a Covid-19 test, only to find the results were then lost. He told the PA news agency he had gone back to work after finding he was unable to book another test, which he intended to take as a precaution after his children became ill.

Elsewhere, in London, police were this week forced to turn people away from one of the capital’s main drive-in testing centres after it became “overbooked”.

Read more

Health secretary Matt Hancock said the system, which he defended as “excellent”, had been flooded by people who were not eligible for tests, suggesting that the public was part to blame for the emerging issues seen across the UK.

Yet public health experts – along with Labour, who accused the Johnson administration of “staggering incompetence” – have insisted that the government is solely responsible for the failing service.

“The testing system is clearly dysfunctional,” Martin McKee, a professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told The Independent. “It’s shambolic. We need a functional find, test, trace, isolate and support system – which we don’t have.

“We’ve got people being sent from London to Cardiff or Aberdeen or wherever. The contact tracing system, I’m hearing from my colleagues, is in meltdown at the minute and not working. None of it is joined up, there's no clear lines and the whole thing has been poorly managed from the very beginning.

“In England it's been completely mismanaged. That doesn’t mean we should stand back and do nothing. Somebody really needs to get a grip on this, but the chances of that are extremely remote because quite clearly the PM's attention is elsewhere at the minute."

Gabriel Scally, a visiting professor of public health at the University of Bristol and a member of Independent Sage, insisted that the government needed to do more in transferring responsibility for the system away from Whitehall to local authorities and health teams.

“It has to be locally based, around local authorities, the local directors of public health, the local NHS and local communities – that's where resources should be going,” he told The Independent.

Authorities in Blackburn and Manchester have enjoyed some success in centralising the testing system under a local network, Prof McKee explained, but “they’ve had to fight very hard to get a seat at the table”.

Dr David Strain, chair of the British Medical Association’s Medical Academic Staff Committee, said the failings of the testing system had undermined recent efforts to reopen society and the economy.

“The cornerstone of easing lockdown restrictions is a robust test and trace system, yet there have been repeated failures in the system, highlighted yesterday when Sarah-Jane Marsh, the director of testing at NHS Test and Trace, admitted that people are unable to access Covid-19 tests because of labs reaching capacity,” he said.

Mr Hancock has admitted it will take "weeks" to solve the laboratory “pinch-point” that Ms Marsh pointed to in her public apology on Tuesday. She said that authorities “are doing all we can to expand quickly”.

Prof Scally urged the government to look to the example of Germany, widely revered for its ongoing response to the pandemic, where health officials have adopted a test and trace strategy “more similar to what was done in South Korea”.

“In the UK, there's a system where you call people and say 'tell me who your contacts are' and then tell those people to isolate. We've got no system of supporting people who are isolating, no means of following up.

“But in Germany, as in a number of the Asian countries, they will say ‘we've got someone who has got it, let's go and talk to the contacts, test them, talk to their contacts, follow it back and try to understand why this outbreak occurred, where they go it, was it where they were working, where they had a meal’ and actually make a proper diagnosis of what the problem is. We're largely not doing that here.”

Looking ahead to winter and the possibility of a second wave, Prof Scally warned that “it's going to be a very rocky period”.

“We still don’t have effective test and tracing. It feels like we’re back to where we were in March.”

He added: "When history is written, the early summer will be looked back upon as a missed opportunity.  Numbers were going down. Scotland nearly got to zero. Northern Ireland got way down to nearly zero as well – zero in terms of deaths, down into the teens in terms of cases. England was higher but not by that much. That was as close as we got to really getting it under control.

“We missed a great opportunity to get the virus off the island of Britain and Ireland.”