Baroness Harding revealed the huge shortfall in the number of people wanting tests and the ability to carry them out as she said 27 percent have no symptoms at all. The under-fire Tory peer said demand was “significantly outstripping” current capacity as cases continue to surge. And she claimed that no one had predicted how many people would need a test despite millions of children returning to school since the beginning of September.
Concerns about the testing system have been mounting with many people across the country struggling to get coronavirus tests since infections began to rise.
New NHS data shows only a third of people were getting test results in England within the Government’s 24-hour target period – the worst performance since mid June.
Baroness Harding told the Commons Science and Technology Committee that the latest capacity for diagnostic tests is 242,817 with just over 200,000 actually being carried out every day.
“There’s significantly more demand than there is capacity today,” she said.
She said people were coming forward for tests if they didn’t have symptoms.
Some 27 percent of people polled by Test and Trace said they were at the test centre because they had been in contact with someone with symptoms – rather than having symptoms themselves.
Baroness Harding said there had been a “very marked increase” in number of young children coming forward.
“A doubling of the number of children under 17 coming forward to be tested and more than that in ages 5-9,” she said.
She confirmed ministers will ration tests by prioritising hospital patients, followed by social care and NHS staff, then testing in outbreak areas.
Among the “broad general public”, Lady Harding said: “We are looking to prioritise, within that, key workers, particularly teachers.”
She said the government was “on track” to increase capacity to 500,000 antigen tests a day by the end of October.
And she conceded that will not be enough. “I am certain we will need more as we go beyond the end of October,” she said.
Tory chairman Greg Clark criticised the Government’s efforts.
The ex-Cabinet Minister said: “It is dispiriting to find that we are now in September, in circumstances which are entirely predictable – people are going back to school, people are going back to work – and we haven’t had the right capacity put in place during the quieter times of June, July and August.”
Baroness Harding said the problems in the system were to do with lab capacity, rather than at the testing sites.
She said: “We have to restrict the number of people who are taking tests in the testing sites so that there’s no risk of those tests going out of date when they are processed in the labs.
“So I do understand how frustrating it feels that when you arrive in the testing site and it doesn’t look like it’s very busy and you can see it could do more, but the capacity constraint isn’t in those testing sites, it’s back in the lab.
“And it would be very dangerous to send too many samples back to the laboratory, have them not be processed and people not know what their results were.”
Earlier, Commons leader Jacob Rees-Mogg said people should stop their “endless carping” about a lack of Covid-19 tests as he claimed the “phenomenal success” of Britain’s testing system should be celebrated.
