55,000 Londoners missed by test and trace despite contact with coronavirus

  • london
  • November 6, 2020
  • Comments Off on 55,000 Londoners missed by test and trace despite contact with coronavirus
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The huge total — nearly enough to fill Arsenal’s Emirates stadium — was revealed in latest official data on the performance of a £12 billion project that was supposed to help allow the country return to a relatively normal life while the search for a vaccine goes on.

Instead experts said that the latest figures, released on the day that England entered its second lockdown, only served to highlight how Test and Trace is being “overwhelmed”.

Yesterday’s figures show that since the launch of the system in May almost 40 per cent of identified close contacts of infected people in London were not reached by the call centres set up to warn that they needed to isolate.

Some 54,950 individuals across the capital were not made aware of the potential risk they posed and could have, in turn, been infecting others despite being identified as contacts.

Ealing had the highest number of any borough with almost 3,000, followed by 2,719 in Redbridge, 2,702 in the City and Hackney, 2,461 in Newham and 2,404 in Barnet. The “success rate” is consistently lower in London and the other big cities where population density makes it harder to identify who might have been exposed to carriers of Covid-19.

It is the latest evidence that a system lauded as the envy of the world by Health Secretary Matt Hancock has done little to prevent a devastating second wave of infections that has resulted in almost 800 deaths in the last two days alone.

A series of high profile disasters included:

  • The recruitment of thousands of contract tracers who were given almost nothing to do.

A massive shortfall in testing capacity when the second wave began due to bottlenecks at the huge “lighthouse” laboratories used to process tests at the exclusion of smaller facilities.

A series of embarrassing tech blunders including the disappearance of almost 16,000 cases from a spreadsheet in September and an error with the NHS Covid app that left thousands of people unaware they were exposed to the virus.

Difficulties in persuading contacts to engage with the system with studies showing less than 20 per cent of those asked to self-isolate were doing so.

Slow test turnaround times that fatally undermined efforts to contain the spread of the virus.

Today’s data also shows that London is lagging behind the rest of the country when it comes to reaching those who have tested positive and need to enter the Test and Trace system. Since the launch, 76.4 per cent of people have been reached compared with more than 81 per cent nationally. Of the 32 local authorities in England that failed to hit 80 per cent, 17 were  London boroughs.

Interim executive chairwoman of the National Institute for Health Protection Dido Harding said: “We know that there are areas where we still need to improve and we are working tirelessly to make the service quicker and more effective every day.”