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Pandemic diary: The critical case for testing in the UK


Michael Gove has just announced that the UK is currently carrying out 8,000 tests per day. Previously, he indicated that not only the NHS frontline will be tested but also members of the civil service. Mr Gove announced today that 25,000 will be carried out per day, but not until the end of April. But why are these statements not attracting more criticism? Is it due to a lack of understanding of the magnitude of the problem regarding testing?

The NHS employs over 1 million people, where 423,000 are doctors and nurses in 2019. It was reported that an extra 20,000 doctors and nurses will be able to join the NHS frontline, reallocated from the private health sector. Additionally, up to 65,000 retired doctors and nurses have been asked to come back to the NHS in England and Wales during the crisis. This is the NHS frontline workforce who should be offered testing as a priority, and their number could amount to over 500,000 people. If the government fulfills its promise of ramping up testing to 25,000 per day at the end of April, then the timeline to testing these people only once would be a long 20 days, if done without pause.

The worryingly slow pace and availability of testing is even more problematic if we consider other factors. The Health Secretary has asked for NHS volunteers to deliver food and medicine and they number 750,000. If these people are taken into account as part of the frontline then even at 25,000 tests per day the timeline for testing them once could be elongated to almost two months. This number does not even take into consideration the civil servants that Michael Gove wants to include. I would argue that testing should eventually be further prioritised to all key workers within and outside the NHS frontline such as: carers, pharmacists, rubbish collectors and many others that could be at a higher risk, which is particularly important in order to stop the spread in their sectors.

The importance of testing needs to be emphasised as a means of dealing with the crisis now and going into the future. South Korea is a good example of the importance of early testing as they were able to track, test and isolate quickly all of the members of a religious sect that had the first cases of Covid-19, which allowed the country to be able to dramatically reduce their number of new cases.

South Korea are still struggling to contain the virus and are seeing a slow increase in their number of new cases due to new clusters and people travelling back from overseas. Daily life is not yet returning back to normal in South Korea, for instance after a repeated delay of the new school year they are resorting to online classes from April. They are fighting against an economic fallout with partial and temporary closures of companies.

Going into the future the lessons from South Korea indicate that testing will be a vital tool to allow a relatively slow return to activities, together with tracing and isolation of cases. South Korea can be a good example in that front as well, although critical questions will need to be asked in relation to their use of tracking and personal information before we could assimilate a similar approach.

In the meantime, we are left wondering how testing could be implemented in order to cover the substantial frontline services at its current rate of 8,000 tests per day during the next month, which at this rate would have taken over two months for only doctors and nurses to be tested once ignoring NHS volunteers entirely. A suggestion to tackle this problem, which I commonly hear, is perhaps using the extensive number of well equipped labs in the UK and its scientific and industrial workforce, where many of us would be willing to help.

Since my previous publication attracted a lot more attention and debate than I anticipated, and in an effort to combat misinformation here below I compiled a list of all of my sources.

What are my sources?

The NHS figures
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/audio-video/key-facts-figures-nhs
Private sector extra staff
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51989183
Retired doctors and nurses asked back to the NHS
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51969104
NHS volunteers
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51714498
The spread of misinformation
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/researchers-are-tracking-another-epidemic-too-misinformation
Testing in South Korea
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-targets-coronavirus-testing-while-south-korea-goes-big-the-us-faces-which-path-to-take/2020/03/28/97e81b44-6eb6-11ea-a156-0048b62cdb51_story.html
(in Spanish)
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-51836302
The struggle to contain the virus is South Korea (read Edward White)
https://www.ft.com/content/1581cbdb-c47e-3073-b629-017397a981e5



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