Face of Nation International : The UK government’s pledge to carry out 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of the month is unravelling, with NHS laboratory staff and scientists warning they do not have the test kits, chemicals and components they need to scale up.
Boris Johnson is personally calling the major companies that make test kits to try to secure the UK supply, it has emerged, in competition with prime ministers and presidents from around the world. NHS lab staff and biomedical scientists talk of intense frustration, saying they have the labs ready but cannot get the materials, which include test kits, reagents and plastics such as small tubes and pipettes.
“On behalf of the biomedical scientists and laboratory staff of the NHS, the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) wants to express the frustration of our members and clarify that we are testing to the limit of our materials and that we are ready to increase capacity – but only if we are given what we need,” they said in a statement.
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, talked with confidence of achieving 25,000 virus tests a day for those ill in hospital and NHS staff who have symptoms or are in a household with somebody who is sick, so that they can go back to work. These are PCR (polymerase chain reaction) swab tests, sometimes called antigen tests, which need to be processed with specialised kits in a lab. Testing for Covid-19 has increased and exceeded a previous target of 10,000 per day, though later than the government initially promised.
Hancock’s bigger goal of carrying out 100,000 tests in England by the end of the month includes antibody tests – the fingerprick blood test that could be done at home. Hancock said he had bought 3.5m test kits and is known to have ordered millions more from nine companies, but the first tests to be put through validation at Oxford University have failed. (Source: The Guardian News – UK)
