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LONDON – For Britons seeking to judge their government’s desperate response to the coronavirus pandemic, the verdict has been reduced increasingly to two numbers: 100,000, the number of tests officials promised to perform every day in late April. ; and 27,510, the last death toll.
On Friday, there was good and bad news in the numbers: The government announced that it had exceeded its testing target, conducting 122,347 tests on the last day of the month. But with 739 more people dying from the virus that same day, Britain was also on the verge of overtaking Italy in a few days as the worst affected country in Europe.
Fixing the numbers is understandable but misplaced, experts said. Just because Britain can carry out more than 100,000 tests a day does not mean that it has developed an effective testing and contact tracing program, which experts say is necessary to prevent another spike in infections if the government eases the blockade. .
And while there would be grim symbolism for Britain in moving to Italy in total deaths, making direct comparisons between two countries is extremely difficult, given the differences in population, demographics, population density, and how the authorities compile the statistics.
Still, Britain’s health secretary Matt Hancock announced the completion of 122,000 tests, a 10-fold increase since he set the goal on April 2, a day after he came out of isolation with symptoms of the virus.
He said the achievement had set the stage for an equally ambitious program of contact tracing: identifying people who have come into contact with an infected person so they can also isolate themselves, helping to reduce the spread of the disease. Hancock said this program would eventually allow Britain to lift its lockdown and return to an appearance of normalcy.
“I knew it was a bold target, but we needed a bold target,” said a visibly relieved Mr. Hancock, for whom the target had become a personal melting pot. “The challenge that we still face is enormous, but we are making real progress.”
There were some lingering questions about whether the government changed its test-counting policy to reach its goal. While officials insisted that the rules had not changed, they acknowledged counting more than 27,000 home test kits and more than 12,000 tests sent to satellite testing centers, at the time they were mailed instead of when they returned to the labs, with results.
Regardless of how many tests Britain has conducted, medical experts said the government had yet to build a contact-tracking operation to match its testing capabilities. Critics said drawing attention to the 100,000th was primarily a public relations stunt.
“The number of people screened doesn’t make sense,” said Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious disease expert at the University of Exeter School of Medicine. “If you don’t follow up on contact tracing, then you’re testing it as a ceremony rather than a way to contain and isolate the outbreak.”
However, other experts said it was worthwhile to set a numerical target for the tests, given Britain’s slow start. In March, officials decided to abandon testing and screening in the general population in favor of evaluating only those with symptoms severe enough to be hospitalized.
“When there is a political priority to do something, then it can happen,” said Professor Devi Sridhar, director of the University of Edinburgh’s global health governance program. “Now we need the same effort and priority for tracing and isolation, as included in a package: test, trace, isolate.”
To some extent, the government is a victim of its penchant for using numbers to assure the public that it has a coherent plan. On March 19, in one of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s first public statements about the crisis, he said he believed the British people could send the virus to “pack” in 12 weeks.
Along with the plan to scale up the tests, the government plans to recruit around 18,000 people, including about 3,000 in the field, to track contacts. It is supposed to work with a cell phone app that is being tested next week in one location, the Isle of Wight.
But so far, Downing Street has been unable to say how many of the 18,000 new employees have been recruited.
Johnson once set a target of 250,000 tests per day, though the government now says it was conceived at a time when an inexpensive and easy-to-use antibody test was being sought, which would detect whether a person had been infected in the past. In fact, when announced, Hancock’s 100,000 goal also included the possibility of counting antibody tests.
“The goals work when you are confident that achieving them helps you meet your goal,” said Stewart Wood, an adviser to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “The problem with this type of targeting is that it suggests a level of competition that is not supported by the strategy.”
From the start, the government has publicly planned the country’s death toll relative to its neighbors, a comparison that initially seemed favorable to Britain. But that information came under scrutiny, as it was based on deaths in hospitals only, while in France, for example, deaths in nursing homes were also included.
When non-hospital deaths were recently added to the equation, Britain suddenly appeared among the worst death rates in Europe. That prompted the government to add another new graph, based on per capita death rates, that puts it behind Belgium, Spain, and Italy.
As of Friday, Italy’s deaths totaled 28,236, a number that excludes nursing home deaths. His daily death rate has declined mainly in the past week, and was 269 on Friday.
“You can see the change in government messages emerge, and the new line is the importance of comparability of data,” he said. Sophia Gaston, director of the British Foreign Policy Group and member of the London School of Economics.
“There is some truth to that,” he said, “but at the same time it is about realizing that Britain is likely to come out of this with a pretty horrible report card.”
The government, Wood said, would have been better served by explaining the uncertainty about the statistics from the start and by being more explicit about the lack of updated figures on deaths in nursing homes.
“The public would have understood that lack of certainty,” he said. “Instead, they have stuck to measures that everyone has gradually come to know are not entirely correct, and then had to change, almost as a concession.”
Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reports from Rome.
