LONDON, April 2 — Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised to ramp up testing for coronavirus after his government faced criticism for being slower than some European peers to roll out mass checks for front-line health workers and the population.
Britain initially took a much more restrained approach to the outbreak but changed tack after modelling showed a quarter of a million people in the country could perish.
Johnson imposed more stringent measures, effectively shuttering the world’s fifth largest economy, but the government has faced widespread criticism for having far too few ventilators and doing far too few tests.
“We’re also massively increasing testing,” Johnson said in a video message from a flat in Downing Street where he is self-isolating after testing positive himself.
“I want to say a special word about testing because it is so important. As I have said for weeks and weeks, this is the way through: this is how we will unlock the coronavirus puzzle, this is how we will defeat it in the end.”
Johnson’s message, posted on Twitter on Wednesday evening, followed pledges from his ministers to accelerate testing in the days and weeks ahead after a slew of sometimes contradictory statements on the numbers already checked.
While Germany has been testing about 500,000 people a week, Britain’s current capacity is about 13,000 a day, a figure the government said it was aiming to double by mid-April.
As of 0800 GMT on April 1, 152,979 people in the United Kingdom have been tested, of which 29,474 were confirmed positive. The death toll rose 31 per cent to 2,352 as of 1600 GMT on March 31.
Enabling Return to Work
Tests are essential for both fighting the virus and nursing the economy back to health after what is expected to be the worst quarter in around a century.
Testing frontline health staff allows those with immunity to return to work while broader testing of the population would allow tens of millions of idled workers back to work.
So far, tests have been focused on those suspected to have the virus and admitted to hospital, but the government plans to increase testing of frontline healthcare staff to hundreds of thousands in coming weeks.
“What we need to do is massively ramp up not just tests so that you can know whether you have had the disease in the past - so-called antibody tests - so that will enable you to go to work in the confidence that you can’t be infected or infectious,” Johnson said.
Ministers have suggested shortages of necessary chemicals were a factor, though the industry has said the necessary reagents are being manufactured and delivered to the National Health Service.
Paul Nurse, chief executive of the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical discovery institute researching the biology underlying human health, said Britain was not ready for the outbreak and for mass testing in particular.
“We weren’t sufficiently prepared, I think that’s clear but now the time is to get our shoulder behind the wheel and do as much as we can to help everybody in this country,” he told BBC radio. — Reuters
