The UK Government is aiming to carry out 100,000 tests a day by the end of this month, but Prof Pennington believes the target should be nearer one million
One of the problems that they think there will be post lockdown is that pre-lockdown the virus was in hotspots. Post lockdown the virus has had time and opportunity to spread throughout the country, so any flare up post lockdown is likely to be much more widespread.
That poses a lot of logistic problems. Previously you could divert resources to hotspots from places which weren't suffering so badly.
We've set up our testing and hospital over spills in very centralised locations rather than trying to build capacity on a more universal accessable basis which perhaps is the wrong way to go about things. You will end up with places where people have less access to health care, having breakouts before it goes noticed by authorities - by which point, it could be too late.
In this sense 100,000 tests per day split across the country isn't necessarily that many. There are 69 official cities in the UK ( 51 in England, seven in Scotland, six in Wales, and five in Northern Ireland.) Several town without city status have higher populations than some of the cities on the official list too.
For the sake of argument lets give every English City 1000 tests to every city but London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bradford, Bristol, Leicester, Nottingham and Liverpool (populations above 300,000). Thats half your tests gone already before you've given any to the major population centres or you've thought about towns and rural areas.
100,000 tests a day, doesn't actually go that far once you've spread them out to where people can actually get to them and use them. Realistically you need to be mobilising this to more like GP level. There's roughly 7000 GP surgeries in England. Thats 14 tests per day per GP. Is that really enough?