BRITAIN’S chief scientific advisor has admitted testing has not been ramped up fast enough to fight coronavirus.
Sir Patrick Vallance said yesterday testing needed to be done swiftly and at scale to truly understand how the deadly virus has been spreading in communities.
Sir Patrick told ITV: “The testing at the beginning, Public Health England (PHE) got off to a good start in terms of testing to make sure they caught people coming into the country with it.”
“It has not been scaled as fast as it needs to scale, that is being done now.”
He said the national fight against coronavirus rested on the UK’s ability to test huge amounts of Brits.
“I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this – it needs to be done at scale and it needs to be done rapidly enough to be able to look at outbreaks and isolate (cases).”
When asked if Germany’s humongous effort to get widespread testing up and running had helped them keep their death rates so low, Sir Patrick said “no question, in my view, testing is an incredibly important part of how we need to manage this going forward.”
“It was something we raised right at the beginning as something that needed to be in place and we need to get more testing, and that’s happening at the moment.”
Around 350,000 people in Germany are being tested for coronavirus every week.
Of the 130,000 confirmed cases of Germans with coronavirus, only 3,194 have died.
As of Sunday, just over 10,000 people in the UK were being tested daily.
367,667 Brits have been tested since the start of the outbreak.
Yesterday, the death toll in the UK hit 11,329.
His comments come after the Government continues to come under fire over their failure to test NHS and healthcare workers who are on the frontline of the fight against COVID-19.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has promised 100,000 people a day will be tested by the end of the month.
So far, 43,000 NHS workers and their families have been tested.
There are over 500,000 NHS staff who are facing the worst of the fight against coronavirus.
Sir Patrick admitted they had made a mistake in not ensuring there were enough tests for medical staff.
He said: “What needs to be done in hospitals clearly hasn’t been done at the scale thats enabled all the healthcare testing, that’s why it’s so important it does get into the right position now.”
HOAR revealed testing at drive-through facilities was still going at a snail’s pace, and NHS staff were being turned away if they didn’t have an appointment.
As well as fighting to get tested, NHS workers are still having to beg for enough personal protective equipment.
One nurse revealed they had been forced to cut up bin bags and plastic curtains to use as make-shift protective aprons.
Mr Hancock has said more than 742 million pieces of PPE have been delivered since the start of the outbreak.
