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Tonight Boris Johnson turned the screw on Matt Hancock by promising that the government would increase the daily tests to hundreds of thousands.
The embattled Secretary of Health will be tasked with meeting the Prime Minister’s ambitious goal despite failing to reach his 100,000 goal for eight days in a row.
Hancock’s cabinet job is reportedly hanging by a thread after a raid on Johnson, who was scathing about handling the crisis while in hospital.
In his speech to the nation establishing a three-stage exit plan, the Prime Minister said Britain had made “rapid progress” on the tests, even though Number 10 has been repeatedly accused of being too slow to respond. to the crisis.
Figures released today show less than 93,000 tests were conducted on May 9, meaning authorities have not followed through on their ambitious six-figure promise since May 2.
Boris Johnson addressed the nation from Downing Street to draw a road map from closure
Hancock’s cabinet job is reportedly hanging by a thread after a raid by Johnson, who was scathing about handling the crisis while in hospital
But questions have been raised about whether the ministers actually achieved the goal, and Hancock was accused of manipulating the figures to achieve his precious goal earlier this month. No more than 25,000 tests were performed per day in the first three weeks of April.
Official data released by the Department of Health each day shows that the government has never evaluated more than 100,000 people in a 24-hour period.
It comes after it was revealed today that up to 50,000 coronavirus test samples had to be shipped from the UK to the US. USA After the “operational problems” in the laboratory network caused system delays.
In other developments for the UK testing fiasco, it was revealed this weekend that key workers trying to book a coronavirus test using the government website were offering spaces requiring a 400-mile round trip.
The results for some patients take up to 10 days to return from the laboratory, despite the fact that the ministers intend to send the results within 48 to 72 hours after the test.
The World Health Organization (WHO) previously warned that no country should consider lifting social distancing measures until it has the capacity to evaluate each suspected case.
Without mass testing, people with symptoms simply must assume they have the virus and isolate themselves, which experts fear they will refuse to do if frustration increases after months of confinement.
Ministers currently have no idea how big the UK outbreak really is due to their controversial decision to abandon a widespread testing regime before the crisis began to spread and spread across Britain.
Figures released today show that fewer than 93,000 tests were conducted on May 9, meaning authorities have not kept their ambitious promise of 100,000 per day since May 2.
In his address to the nation tonight, Johnson said: “We must quickly reverse the terrible epidemics in nursing homes and on the NHS, and while the numbers are declining sharply now, there is clearly much more to do.”
‘And if we want to control this virus, then we must have a global system to test potential victims and to track their contacts.
‘So in total we are testing literally hundreds of thousands of people every day.
‘We have advanced rapidly in testing, but there is much more to do now, and we can do it.
“When this started, we had not seen this disease before, and we did not fully understand its effects.”
‘Every day we receive more and more data. We are illuminating the light of science on this invisible assassin, and we will pick it up where it strikes. ‘
Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer told Sky News that the Labor Party had lobbied the government to “speed up” its response to the pandemic.
He added: ‘We pushed the government in the closure, we pressured them in the tests, we pressured them in the PPE.
‘Now we push and challenge with the purpose, which was to try to speed them up.
‘And I said that under my leadership we are not willing to earn political party points. So it was to make them accelerate and increase. ”
Figures released by the Health Department this afternoon showed 92,837 tests were performed on May 9.
It means that more than 1.8 million swabs have been made since Britain began evaluating patients at the start of the crisis.
The figures also show that 1.3 million Britons have been tested for COVID-19, about 2 percent of the population of 66 million.
This means that approximately 14 tests are carried out on every 10 people, suggesting that a third of suspected patients are performed twice.
People can be tested twice if something goes wrong during the test, to confirm the result, or if a doctor receives a negative result for their patient and does not believe it.
Whereas in other cases, someone may re-test after developing symptoms a second time, but the test is negative on an earlier swab.
The government has faced a huge backlash over the lack of mass testing since the virus, called SARS-CoV-2, began spreading on British soil in February.
The United Kingdom effectively abandoned efforts to detect all symptoms last month when the response went from “containment” to the “delay” phase.
Instead, testing was largely restricted to those in the hospital, while those who suspected they were mildly infected were urged to isolate themselves.
The ministers were stung by comparisons with countries like Germany and South Korea, which conducted large-scale tests and had much lower death rates.
Several private laboratories, which have the capacity to conduct thousands of tests a day, said their offers to help the government had fallen on deaf ears in the initial stage of the outbreak.
In response to news that the United Kingdom had sent test samples to the USA. In the US, the Health Department said it was one of the contingencies to treat so-called teething problems in a rapidly expanding test system.
It is understood that the test results will be validated in the UK and communicated to patients “as quickly as possible”.
The department said work has been done to resolve the issues and that capacity is being restored rapidly.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘The expansion of the UK coronavirus testing network has involved the creation of a completely new network of’ Lighthouse ‘laboratories to process test swabs.
‘When problems arise, we have contingencies that include creating additional temporary capacity for our laboratories or shipping swabs abroad to partner laboratories for completion.
“Of course, our partner laboratories must meet our high standards.”
The Sunday Telegraph reported that the samples were airlifted to the United States on chartered flights from Stansted Airport.
But health leaders said they expected “fluctuations” in the numbers, and that the tests were still much higher than at the start of the outbreak.
Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said that not much could be read about daily variations.
Speaking at the briefing, he added: “ We are now really on a high plateau, in the region of 100,000 tests per day.
“There are some fluctuations, and frankly I hope there will be some fluctuation from day to day.”
“I don’t think we can read too much from day-to-day variations, but the macro picture is that it’s now at a much, much higher level than ever at the start of this crisis.”
Professor Van-Tam also said that the testing and tracking strategy of finding people with the virus and tracking people they have come into contact with was part of the steps necessary to facilitate the blockade.
When asked if he agreed that new infections had to be reduced by hundreds per day for the strategy to be effective when it is currently in the thousands, he said that it was entirely appropriate that it be part of the “general measures” to address the virus.
Professor Van-Tam said in the briefing that the extent of the strategy should depend on the level of disease in the population.
He said: ‘Those two together make a test-and-trace package, and we’ve been very clear that testing and tracing by themselves is part of the solution to how we continue to live with this virus after the crash.
‘It is not the total solution.
‘The extent of testing and tracing clearly depends on the level of disease in the population, but it is entirely appropriate to see it as part of the general measures that will give us more flexibility and more space on what we can do in The space of social distancing to make things easier.
“But by itself it is a contribution, it is not a total solution.”
The news comes after Matt Hancock urged Boris Johnson to “give me a break” in a furious raid on the coronavirus crisis.
Pressure on Hancock over his handling of the crisis intensified last night after it was discovered that more than 25 million protective goggles offered front-line NHS workers an inadequate defense against the deadly virus.
The latest in a series of shameful government flaws in personal protective equipment (PPE) came when leading sources suggested to The Mail on Sunday that Mr. Hancock was now living “on borrowed time” in the cabinet.
It comes after it was claimed last week that accurate antibody tests that can tell millions of Britons if they have had coronaviruses will be rolled out across the UK within a fortnight.
Test giant Roche Diagnostics said it has created a kit accurate enough to be used at scale, and the company said it has enough stock to supply hundreds of thousands to the NHS each week.
It comes after weeks of disappointment regarding the massive rollout of antibody tests in Britain, which are designed to determine whether someone has contracted the virus in the past and to indicate whether they can now be immune. They don’t tell precisely if someone is currently infected.
Despite promising home antibody tests, the UK has yet to approve any because the government insists it cannot find a fingertip kit that is accurate enough, despite only evaluating a handful of tests.
Roche, based in Switzerland, claims that its ‘Elecsys’ laboratory test, which is not designed to give people a result in their own home, can detect 100 percent of people who have not had the coronavirus and the 99.8 percent of people who have been infected
The blood sample kit, which can be processed by machines already in use in NHS laboratories across the country, has received the vital ‘CE mark’ that proves it is safe. Doctors can get results in just 18 minutes.
Experts said the evidence is unlikely to be available to buy privately, at least initially, because officials would be unable to access the data they desperately need to plan the spread of the virus. It is unclear how much the tests could cost, whether they can be purchased, and when.
Instead, the test is likely to play a role in the government’s ‘surveillance’ program, which will see nurses take blood samples from thousands of homes and send them to Oxford University laboratories for officials to determine how far the virus has spread in Britain.
Antibody testing is seen as key to facilitating draconian blockade and getting Britain back on its feet because it provides the clearest picture possible of how widespread the coronavirus is in the UK.
