Public Health England ignored offers of coronavirus testing help as anger mounts at Government's failure to ramp up capacity
As ministers face growing questions over the failure to ramp up testing, The Telegraph can disclose that officials have repeatedly ignored offers of help from many of the country’s leading scientific institutions.
Meanwhile, senior health sources warned that the moment for this country to launch a successful mass community testing programme may already have been lost.
Professor Matthew Freeman, head of Oxford University’s Dunn School of Pathology, one of the country’s leading disease research institutions, revealed that his repeated offers to provide dozens of specialised machines and expert staff had been largely ignored by Public Health England.
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Around two weeks ago, Britain’s strategy switched after Imperial College modellers warned that leaving the disease to spread largely unchallenged could result in 250,000 deaths.
But by this time test kits were in short supply and laboratories had not been readied for action. Initially only a single Government lab, PHE’s main facility at Colindale, was charged with processing tests, with 11 more added later, along with 29 laboratory networks run by NHS Trusts.
At that early stage, thousands of swabs sent to PHE by GPs who suspected their patients had contracted the disease were destroyed before they were analysed because they did not meet strict criteria, sources revealed.
“If they had looked at those swabs earlier instead of throwing them away, we could have got a handle on this thing much earlier,” one GP told The Telegraph.
When it became clear that the herd immunity strategy risked disaster, the strategy changed and ministers and public health officials began prioritising testing amid widespread criticism.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/31/public-health-england-ignored-offers-testing-help-amid-mounting/