England’s Contact Tracers Fail to Reach a Third of New Cases
England’s Contact Tracers Fail to Reach a Third of New Cases
(Bloomberg) --
Britain’s coronavirus contact tracers failed to track down a third of the cases referred to them in England in the first week of an operation aimed at stemming the pandemic.
Among 8,117 people who tested positive for the virus, 5,407 were reached and asked to provide details about their contacts with others, the Department of Health and Social Care said in a statement on its website on Thursday. Contact tracers then reached some 85% of people identified as having been exposed to the infection and advised them to self-isolate.
“For the first week of a scale citizen service, this is good performance,” Dido Harding, the chair of NHS Improvement who is overseeing the Test and Trace Service, told reporters Thursday. “Clearly it can and needs to and will get better.”
With few treatments and no vaccine approved, locked-down countries are looking for ways to prevent the spread of Covid-19 while allowing at least some business and social activity to resume. South Korea and Germany have used aggressive testing and contact-tracing programs to make sure that infected people, and those who may be infected, keep from passing the virus on to others.
Ramping Up
The U.K. testing regime has been beset by problems, and government scientists have said that they gave up on contact tracing in March because there wasn’t the capacity to deal with the volume of cases. Since then they’ve been ramping up capacity and waiting for caseloads to come down to be able to implement an effective system.
The U.K. now has a capacity to process 200,000 tests per day, and on May 28, it started its test and trace system, relying on 25,000 contact tracers, including 7,000 clinicians.
The program was originally supposed to be coupled with an app for the public to install on their phones that would then have helped detect if they’d been near people who had tested positive for coronavirus. The app began testing May 7 on the Isle of Wight, southern England, but has yet to be rolled out nationwide.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Thursday that the app, originally slated for release in mid-May, would only be given a wider launch “when it is right to do so.”
The data unveiled Thursday showed tracers had identified 31,794 contacts of those who tested positive in the first week of the program’s operation. Just under 27,000 were advised to self-isolate.
“We’re not at gold standard yet,” Harding said. Hancock said authorities are “building and improving” the system “all the time.”
“It has to get better and better,” he said. “The better test and trace is, the more lockdown measures we can relieve safely.”
Harding said tracers tried 10 times within 24 hours to contact each exposed person identified. “Will we succeed in contacting everyone? No, probably not. Should we be aspiring to? Yes.”
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