Test, track and trace to start from tomorrow

A test and trace system to contain the spread of coronavirus will be up and running by tomorrow, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.

The PM made the announcement as he faced a grilling from senior MPs over the Dominic Cummings scandal.

The prime minister has appeared before the Commons Liaison Committee this afternoon, after around 40 MPs called for his chief adviser to resign or be fired. Mr Johnson has continued to back Mr Cummings and urged everyone to ‘move on’ from the saga, which was sparked by the PM’s aide driving 260 miles to Durham when his wife had coronavirus symptoms.

In a rare moment that Mr Johnson was able to steer from the topic, he said: ‘From tomorrow, this is a very important development, there will be a new test and trace system which will change people’s lives and which will require a great deal of thought and compliance, and I think it will be worth it for the whole nation’.

The aim of the test and trace system is to move from lockdown towards more targeted measures in specific areas were infection rates might be high.

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The PM previously said it would be up and running by June 1st, meaning the government is ahead of schedule.

Scientists have warned it is not a ‘magic bullet’ and may prevent between 5% and 15% of infections. A group of doctors who set up a pilot scheme in Sheffield said they struggled to get hold of contacts of people who tested positive for coronavirus, and when they did they were reluctant or refused to self-isolate.

This is just one of the challenges the government may face when it comes to rolling out test and trace.

The health committee chair, MP and former Conservative health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said track and trace could be a ‘game changer’ but is only possible with strong testing. He grilled the PM on why it took until April to introduce a 100,000 test target – something other countries such as Germany achieved months ahead of the UK.

Mr Johnson said Public Health England ‘did not have the capacity’ to launch a tracking system earlier, nor ‘did we have enough experienced trackers ready to mount the kind of operation they did in some other countries’.

He admitted the ‘brutal reality’ is that the country did not learn the lessons of previous outbreaks such as SARS and ‘did not have a testing operation ready to go but we now have that’.

Mr Hunt also questioned the prime minister on why it is taking 48 hours for people to get their coronavirus tests back, when in other countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, test results are returned in 24 hours.

The PM replied that the UK is now testing ‘more people than any other country in Europe’ and said 25,000 trackers were in place.

He said he could not promise the process of getting test results back will speed up any time soon, but that 24 hours was the ambition.

‘What we will have tomorrow, will be valuable, it will be useful, it will be a very important tool in our fight against coronavirus, but it will be getting steadily better, to become a truly world beating test and trace operation in the course of the next days as we go through June’ he said.

‘This has gone from a complete standing start to a huge operation, and so Jeremy I don’t want to give you an exact deadline for when we will get down to 24 hours, but that is plainly the ambition, we’ll do it as soon as we can.’

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