Robert Peston Robert Peston

Why is Britain not using its testing capacity?

An NHS is worker is tested for coronavirus (Photo: Getty)

The government’s excuse for why it didn’t engage in a comprehensive testing and tracking approach to contain Covid-19 after it started to spread throughout the community was that – unlike Germany and South Korea – it did not have the sufficient number of labs to process the tests. Well that excuse is almost exhausted, because testing capacity is increasing rapidly.

Take for example the new super lab being built in Cambridge by AstraZeneca (AZN) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), using equipment and technology made in the UK by Primer Design, the molecular diagnostics division of Novacyt.

AZN’s chief executive Pascal Soriot tells me that tests will start any day now and that it will have the capacity to process 30,000 tests per day as soon as early May. From a standing start just a couple of weeks ago, a huge new testing facility is close to completion.

However, this expansion of capacity highlights a separate and highly important infrastructure deficiency – which is how to actually test with swabs all the people deemed a priority to test, and then get the swabs to the labs. Because, believe it or not, right now the problem is not that there isn’t enough capacity to process the tests, even though that was the glaring problem last month. The bigger problem now is actually testing all the healthcare and key workers – in the police, fire service and so on – who have been promised tests.

The point is that the government, even without the new Cambridge lab, has increased testing capacity to 35,000 tests per day, thanks to the establishment of other new super labs, in Milton Keynes, Alderley Park and Glasgow – to meet the health secretary’s target of 100,000 tests per day by the end of April.

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