The UK must strengthen its coronavirus testing and tracing capacity with maximum urgency, including providing isolation and quarantine facilities, according to a report by MPs.
The 19-page document by the Commons science and technology committee criticises many aspects of the government’s performance so far in tackling the coronavirus outbreak, from its abandoning of community testing to lack of transparency about scientific advice.
It urges the UK government to learn from other countries that handled the pandemic better in its early stages, most notably by developing a robust contact-tracing system that did not rely on app-based technology. This would be essential if lockdown measures were to be eased without risking a second spike in Covid-19 cases, the all-party group said.
As well as a system to test anyone at risk of infection and identify their contacts, the UK needed “an extensive programme of isolating and managing infected persons”, the report said.
“When testing and tracing has reached a dependable level and cases have fallen to a low enough level, other countries have found that dedicated facilities to isolate and treat infected people have been important in keeping cases very low.”
Dedicated hospitals and non-clinical facilities, such as requisitioned hotel accommodation, could be used to isolate people, the MPs said. “While intrusive and incurring cost, providing dedicated facilities may be worthwhile when set against the more hidden but vastly greater cost of maintaining tighter restrictions on the rest of the population for longer, if infected individuals are less rigorously isolated from society,” the report said.
“There are no facilities like this in the UK now,” said Greg Clark, the committee’s Conservative chair. “Isolation should not be seen as something punitive, and if the conditions were not penitential then many people would probably welcome being looked after by Covid specialists, without having to worry about infecting people in their household.”
The committee is particularly critical of Public Health England’s decision to concentrate testing in a limited number of its own laboratories and expand testing capacity there, rather than “surging capacity” through the many existing public sector, research institute, university and private sector laboratories.
This decision, which led to the discontinuation of community testing, was “one of the most consequential made during [the] crisis”, the report said.
It meant that residents and workers in care homes — even those displaying Covid-19 symptoms — could not be tested at a time when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant. Yet the committee said repeated requests by email, letter and telephone for an explanation of PHE’s action were ignored.
“The failure of PHE to publish the evidence on which its testing policy was based is unacceptable for a decision that may have had such significant consequences,” the MPs’ report said. “The absence of disclosure may indicate that — notwithstanding the oral evidence given to the committee — no rigorous assessment was in fact made by PHE of other countries’ approach to testing. That would be of profound concern since the necessity to consider the approaches taken by others with experience of pandemics is obvious.”
The report is also very critical of the government’s lack of transparency about Sage, its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. Although some papers used to inform Sage meetings had been published, 92 out of 120 remained secret, the report said.
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May 19, 2020 at 06:07AM
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MPs demand urgent improvement in UK’s Covid-19 performance - Financial Times
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