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LONDON: Increasing COVID-19 testing earlier would have helped the UK by allowing it to trace the contacts of those infected with the new coronavirus, the government’s top scientific advisers told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday (May 5).
The UK has overtaken Italy to report the highest official number of coronavirus deaths in Europe with more than 32,000 deaths, figures released on Tuesday showed.
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Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance told parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee that he was confident that upon reflection there would be things that could have been done differently.
“In the early stages, I think if we had managed to increase testing capacity faster, it would have been beneficial,” said Vallance, former president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline.
“For all sorts of reasons that didn’t happen,” Vallance said. “It is completely wrong to think that testing is the answer: it is only part of the system that you must correct.”
The British government has stepped up testing over the past month, with 945,299 people evaluated so far, although opposition parties say Prime Minister Boris Johnson was too slow to speed up the scheme.
Jenny Harries, deputy chief medical officer, said at the same parliamentary hearing that unlimited testing capacity would have allowed the government to maintain its initial search program for those who tested positive.
However, he said that approach would only have worked if he had found enough resources to track down and track down those who might have been exposed to the virus.
“If we had unlimited capacity and continued support beyond that, perhaps we would choose a slightly different approach, but with the resources we had,” he said.
Weekly figures from the British National Bureau of National Statistics (ONS) added more than 7,000 deaths in England and Wales, bringing the total for the United Kingdom to 32,313 as of April 24.
READ: UK death toll COVID-19 exceeds 32,000, highest in Europe
Both advisers cautioned that it was difficult to make international comparisons of death rates at this stage of the pandemic.
But Vallance said it was not surprising that London and New York had been badly hit.
“I do not think it is a coincidence that two large cosmopolitan cities, well connected with multiple imports from all over the world, New York and London, have been greatly affected.”
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