London: Boris Johnson’s government is investigating how more than 15,000 people infected with coronavirus went unreported, as officials try urgently to trace their contacts and contain the spread of the disease.
Public Health England blamed a “technical issue” for the omission, which raised the prospect that thousands of people — who should have been told to self-isolate — are unaware they had close contact with a Covid-19 case. “There may well be” people infected due to the error, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey told Sky News:
Contact tracers are working extra shifts to tackle the backlog and the government must “determine why the issue wasn’t identified sooner,” Johnson’s spokesman, James Slack, told reporters on Monday. The prime minister still has “full confidence” in Dido Harding, head of the test-and-trace program, Slack said.
It’s yet another blow to the government, which has faced severe criticism over testing capacity and the failure to deliver results fast enough to make the tracing system effective. Johnson last week apologized for people’s “bad experiences,” and on Sunday acknowledged the system needs improvement.
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‘Frustrated’
“Of course I’m frustrated with it,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. “It’s not perfect, but it has made a huge difference to our ability to see where the virus is spreading.”
PHE said 15,841 cases were missed between Sept. 25 and Oct. 2. because data files were too big to be uploaded onto the government’s central database. The glitch has resulted in a surge of cases reported in the past couple of days, with 22,961 on Sunday.
On Monday, Johnson told reporters the new figures — including the missing data — now reflect the prevalence rate predicted by scientists. He said the next week would show whether recent restrictions, including the so-called rule of six on social gatherings, are having an effect.
During a round of interviews, Coffey said she’s “assured” the glitch has been remedied and said the program must contact “as many people as possible to get them to go into self-isolation.”
Patchy performance
“I don’t think there’s anything we can change about history,” Coffey told the BBC. “We can only change how we make sure that these sorts of errors do not happen again in the future.”
Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine and health protection at the University of East Anglia, called the glitch “alarming” and said an effective test-and-trace system has only a very short time frame to be effective.
“This infection is most infectious at around the time people develop symptoms,” Hunter told BBC Radio 4. Tracing “really needs to be done within a matter of a day or so if you’re going to actually have any effect,” he said.
Though the test and trace system has improved in some areas, it’s still falling short on key metrics — in particular the goal of tracing 80% of people who have been in close contact with a confirmed Covid-19 case. Scientists say that’s necessary to lower the coronavirus transmission rate.
In the most recent data, 71.3% of positive cases were reached to request a list of contacts, and of those provided, 71.6% were notified and told to self-isolate.
PHE said people affected by the data error received their test results “in the normal way” but they were not uploaded to the tracing system.
‘Robust measures’
“We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have been put in place as a result,” Michael Brodie, PHE’s interim chief executive, said in a statement.
Coffey was also asked about reports the government is planning to bring in a three-tiered “traffic light” system of coronavirus restrictions to simplify the patchwork of local rules nationwide. She didn’t rule-out the idea, telling Times Radio “these are, I think, still in discussion.”
“We’ve got different rules in different parts of the country and what ministers are hearing is a little bit of ‘how can we know what the rules are?’” Coffey said.- Bloomberg
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