It’s almost unimaginable that government can screw covid testing up so badly.
The greatest weakness of Britain’s strategy from the start has been testing and we’ve always known that autumn would hail a new set of covid challenges which would require a functional testing regime tackle it – yet here we are wholly unprepared and once again plunged into crisis.
So many of Boris Johnson’s wildest promises have involved testing. He said we had a “world class” testing regime and back in March he promised 3.5 million antibody tests “within days”. None of it was true.
I’ve never underestimated the scale of challenge faced by ministers, yet expecting them to learn from their mistakes is entirely reasonable. But they haven’t.
They’ve wasted months and unbelievably we’re in a worse position on testing today than we were at the beginning of summer.
This is the problem: rather than building lab and testing infrastructure into the NHS, government bought in testing from the private sector.
Private contractors only provided what was needed at the time and government figured if they needed more they would simply buy more.
But when that moment came the capacity wasn’t there.
If they’d expanded the lab capacity within the NHS, they’d have known precisely what was possible and what more was needed in terms of expansion, but they didn’t.
Failures like this always have decisions at their root. These things don’t just happen.
So what was available nationwide has been reallocated to the areas of greatest need. That means our testing facilities in Brighton and Hove have been reduced and areas with spikes in contagion have had it increased.
The Amex testing centre has gone and the Withdean temporary test site is no longer taking walk-in patients. You have to book via the central booking site … but you guessed it, they’re not allowing any new bookings there as they can’t process the backlog let alone cope with new tests.
The impact on our city is profound. As you can see from the chart I’ve posted here, the number of people testing positive has risen sharply.
Last Thursday (10 September) the number of people testing positive was as high as during lockdown but worryingly this is on the back of far fewer people being tested.
That’s the real worry, because in much of the country there is so little testing being done that we simply don’t know if contagion is spreading or not. If it is, we won’t know until it’s too late.
The impact on individual residents is also profound. I’ve heard from many, many of you about your experiences in recent days. It is shocking.
