Ahead of today's Downing Street Press Conference, Labour's
Shadow Health and Social Care Secretary has called on the
government to outline why coronavirus testing is still not being
scaled up at sufficient levels, after Health Minister and the Department of Health
and Social Care's own Twitter feed contradicted and , who both claimed yesterday
that the UK had already reached 10,000 coronavirus tests a
day.
Speaking ahead of the Downing Street Press Conference,
, Labour’s Shadow
Health and Social Care Secretary, said:
“Experts continue to call for the UK to significantly ramp
up testing. When Germany is testing around 500,000 people a week,
many are asking why we are still not even hitting the 10,000 a
day promised on March 11th.
“We called for enforced social distancing, but it is a blunt tool
without a national strategy to test and contact trace.
At today’s Downing Street Press Conference we call on ministers
to outline why testing is still not being scaled up at sufficient
levels and what bottlenecks domestically and globally are
hindering this.”
ENDS
Notes to editors
on 29/03 announced that:
"we've reached 10,000 coronavirus tests a day - ahead of
schedule".
on Ridge on Sunday,
29/03: "We have been increasing the number of tests and I can
confirm today that the number of tests being carried out has hit
10,000 now - 10,000 a day."
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/michael-gove-confirms-coronavirus-testing-has-hit-10000-a-day-amid-calls-to-get-more-nhs-staff-checked
on the Andrew Marr
Show, 29/03: "We had 10,000 tests yesterday."
on BBC Today, 30/03:
"We’ve achieved the capacity to have 10,000 people a day
tested. The actual number that were tested on the day in
question I think were around 7,000. But within the next three
weeks we expect to get to 25,000 tests a day."
Fewer than 7k tests in 24-hour period confirmed by these
two tweets from DHSC. Also just under 7k in previous 24-hour
window:
