Covid Tests Come Quickly in Britain, If You Can Pay

(Bloomberg) --

Lara Dann, a jewelry production manager from south London, was faced with a stark choice when her mother became ill with coronavirus symptoms while staying with her.

With no tests available at the time on the U.K. government website, Dann, 43, knew her family faced two weeks of costly quarantine at home with their two-year-old son. So she paid 200 pounds ($260) for a private test. “It was a no-brainer,” she said. “We got him back to nursery in one day, and in terms of lost revenue for me and my husband, it was worth it.”

With Europe’s highest death toll from Covid-19, nowhere else on the continent has come under as much scrutiny for its ability to test the population and curb infections that doubled in England in the week through Oct. 1. And just as the virus continues to expose inequalities between richer and poorer regions, access to the testing system is cleaving along similar lines.

Despite intense efforts by the government to ramp up capacity, slots at testing centers are still being rationed so the centralized laboratories can cope with demand. People are being offered tests sometimes hours away from their homes or being told there is nothing available for days. Others simply open their wallets, and some medics say a financial hierarchy is emerging from a failure to get a grip on the pandemic.

The government’s coronavirus website tells people to seek a private test if they have no symptoms and need a negative result to return to work or travel overseas. Yet it’s clear that people who suspect they have the disease are also paying for tests.

“If the general availability of testing is lower than the people who either have or suspect they have Covid, people are going to look to solve their own problems and look for private sector alternatives,” said Alex Templeton, chief executive officer and founder of private healthcare provider Qured.

His company carries out PCR—polymerase chain reaction—tests, which show if someone currently has Covid-19, and antibody tests that check if someone has had it before. Qured had conducted about 20,000 tests by September, though with businesses now trying to get staff back to work, it has orders for roughly 10,000 tests a month.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said testing capacity was expanding rapidly, adding that the U.K. has “the biggest testing system per head of population of all the major countries in Europe.” The U.K. now processes about 260,000 PCR tests a day compared with 160,000 currently in Germany. 

Testing has become more urgent as Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a battle with leaders of regions who are angry after a series of targeted lockdowns in the poorer north of England, where infection rates are highest.

Going private to speed up scans and procedures is hardly new for those who can afford it—even in a country whose National Health Service is a cherished institution that provides free care to all—and private labs must report positive Covid-19 results to the authorities.

Yet the prevalence of testing outside the NHS also reflects a growing lack of confidence. A YouGov Plc tracker showed 31% of Britons thought the U.K. government was handling the crisis well compared with 72% six months earlier. 

Some private schools, universities and big businesses are choosing to set up their own private testing facilities. Anecdotally, some people are stocking up on test kits bought from places such as Asia.

“It seems outrageous there are private tests that most people won’t be able to afford but are readily available and can be returned to you very quickly,” said James Murray, an opposition Labour Party member of Parliament. “That’s the kind of standard we should have with the NHS tests.” 

With unemployment set to soar and household finances more precarious, avoiding a quarantine could mean the difference between keeping a job and losing it. Companies offering tests mostly promise results within 48 hours.

Those who can’t find a free test and can’t afford to pay have two options: obey the rules and ensure their whole household stays at home for two weeks—or ignore their symptoms, hope it’s not Covid-19 and pose a risk to public health.

Family doctors have been flooded with queries from patients struggling to access government tests. It’s now critical Britain gets the resources to deal with demand as cases spike again, to avoid people being further marginalized because they can’t get access Covid tests, said Martin Marshall, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

Liz Pollara, a doctor in north London, is most concerned by patients who don’t want to get tested at all.

A positive result would mean they “will lose their only household income through a period of testing and self-isolating,” she said. Getting a private test is out of reach. “I work in an area of high deprivation and so these tests would be too expensive for the majority of my patients.”

For others, it’s a necessary financial trade off. Richard, who declined to give his full name, said he paid 220 pounds for a private test in London when his 17-month-old daughter had a temperature, because no government tests were available. He and his wife, who both work full-time, took their older daughters out of school to self-isolate while they waited for the result.

“We did the right thing,” said Richard. “But really it makes you want to break the rules.”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.