The British government’s failure to carry out mass testing for coronavirus, seen as the only realistic way to beat the pandemic, is threatening to become a national scandal, with the criticism led on Wednesday by Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the Edinburgh University.
Sridhar, a respected figure in her field, issued a series of exasperated tweets admonishing the government, which has not succeeded in increasing the number of tests it manages daily from 10,000 to 25,000. The UK is being compared unfavourably with Germany, which conducts 500,000 tweets a week.
Testing is seen as a way of getting NHS staff, who are self isolating at home, to return to work if they test negative. Those who are working in the NHS and in the frontline services say daily testing is necessary to ensure those in contact with patients remain free of coronavirus.
There were a series from tweets from NHS staff urging Shridhar to keep up the pressure on the government.
In one tweet, Shridhar said: “I fear that Imperial (College) perspective (in The Lancet) resulted in the UK giving up on containment too early & assuming everyone will get it.
“Planning & preparing for unprecedented testing & using big data/apps/ for tracing were taken off the table. In my view, we went down the wrong path.”
In another tweet, she said: “Yes, we all need to get behind gov’t- but that doesn’t mean staying quiet when things seem off. I’ve offered concrete suggestions to redirect in a better direction. I’m doing my job being a ‘critical friend’ to people in gov’t and in WHO rather than just saying yes to everything.”
She added: “Speechless every time someone says that this was totally unexpected & nobody saw this coming. See chapter 3: ‘Preparing for the Worst: A Rapidly Spreading, Lethal Respiratory Pathogen’ published by the @WHO Sept 2019.”
Shridhar, 36, was born and raised in Miami and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford where she did her PhD. She is highly regarded for her book, The Battle against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance and the World Bank. In 2017, she and Chelsea Clinton held a joint seminar.
Shridhar set out her case: “South Korea never had lockdown, only 152 deaths, and didn’t expose health staff to unnecessary risk & pressure.
“Each day in lockdown (in the UK): kids fall into poverty, domestic abuse increases, social fabric comes apart, major economic hit.
“Lockdowns are expensive. We need to use the time.
“We will be stuck in lockdown until we get test, trace, isolation plan. We are basically pressing pause on the spread of virus while we race to catch up.
“If we’re not using the time now, then we’re just wasting days/months in lockdown not aggressively figuring out where virus is.”
Michael Gove has admitted the government’s coronavirus testing operation must go “further, faster” after Downing Street suggested a target of 25,000 daily checks may not be met until the end of next month.
The minister for the cabinet office admitted: “While the rate of testing is increasing we must go further, faster.
“A critical constraint on the ability to rapidly increase testing capacity is the availability of the chemical reagents which are necessary in the testing.”
“'The Prime Minister and the health secretary are working with companies worldwide to ensure that we get the material we need to increase tests of all kinds.”
