Yahoo News PHE's inability to deliver mass testing delayed easing of lockdown
Efforts to release Britain from lockdown were repeatedly hampered by the failure to embark on mass surveillance testing to track levels of disease, it can be revealed.
Three and a half weeks after the measures came in, Public Health England (PHE) said it remained unable to deliver a community testing programme for Covid, which could allow ministers to ease social distancing rules, documents show.
The failings emerged alongside evidence suggesting PHE may have misled the Prime Minister when questioned about their testing regime.
Last night the head of the Commons science and technology said the delays and obscurification by health officials had left Britain taking “decisions in the dark”.
The minutes from a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), scientists pressed health officials on the importance of such a regime, to allow informed decision-making. But PHE refused to take on the work - so it was not until April 17 that the Office for National Statistics was asked to instead take it on.
Minutes of the meetings show repeated frustration from Sage at the slow expansion of testing across the country.
On March 13, routine testing and tracing of all cases of Covid-19 was stopped, with efforts limited to hospital cases, staff and suspected clusters of transmission.
On the same day, PHE was asked by Sage to “urgently determine” how it would ramp up capacity to take up to 1,000 blood samples a week.
It followed warnings on Feb 18 that PHE could only cope with tracking and tracing five new cases a week, with modelling suggesting this could be increased to 50 new cases. PHE has since insisted that it could cope with tracking efforts for more cases than five, though it has been unable to say what its capacity was.
New evidence shows how even when Britain’s third case - “the Brighton super-spreader” - was being tracked, the PHE system was creaking so slowly that it took six days to track down some of those he had been in contact with.
Doubts over the capacity for community testing had been raised repeatedly by Government advisory groups for months. On March 6, meetings from a meeting of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag) details how Colin Brown, an infection diseases consultant representing PHE, said "the anticipation is that PHE will not have the ability to test in the community as numbers increase".
On March 16, minutes from a Sage meeting show the major advisory group “highlighted the critical importance of scaling up antibody serology and diagnostic testing" and "a solution is urgently required".
On March 23, Boris Johnson ordered full lockdown, but the Sage minutes show that, another three and a half weeks later, there was still no plan to deliver surveillance testing - tracking levels of Covid-19 across the country. Minutes of 16 April state: “PHE confirmed it was unable to deliver a community testing programme. Sage agreed that if PHE is unable to undertake the programme then this should be undertaken within a repeated ONS-led household survey programme.”
The request was finally made to the ONS the next day, The Sunday Telegraph understands.
He told The Sunday Telegraph: “We turned off the light on being able to see the detailed nature of the course of the infection in this country. That must be remedied so that in future, decisions are not taken in the dark.”
PHE has said it is not responsible for determining overall testing strategy, with the Department of Health and Social Care in overall charge. Jeremy Hunt, chairman of the Commons Health Committee, said community testing was stopped "without anyone understanding the strategic implications for tackling the virus”.
Meanwhile, footage broadcast this week questions the accuracy of information given to the Prime Minister by PHE. In a meeting between Boris Johnson and Prof Yvonne Doyle, PHE's director for health protection, at PHE's laboratory on March 1 shows the Prime Minister asking if those coming into the UK are automatically tested, or just those who are symptomatic. In the video, broadcast on Channel 4’s Dispatches, Prof Doyle appears to imply that anyone coming from “hot zones” would get a test.
When notified by The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, Duncan Selbie, chief executive at PHE, said in a statement: “There is nothing critical of PHE in what Sage had to say. It is a simple statement of fact that the scale of community serology testing would be more appropriate for the ONS, a decision that PHE supported and welcomed. PHE operates reference laboratories for novel and dangerous pathogens, not large scale pathology services.”
Last night PHE refuted the suggestion it misled the PM. "All symptomatic people coming from these so-called hot zones would have got a test - that was well understood by everyone," a source at the organisation said.
