Dido Harding defends 'essential' £37bn service

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-...rvice-12241448



Well, she would say that, wouldn't she .....

Boris Johnson said "It is thanks to NHS Test and Trace that we're able to send kids back to school and begin cautiously and irreversibly to reopen our economy and restart our lives," he said.

Boris Johnson defends NHS Test and Trace after MPs' criticism

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56348558



Well, he would say that, wouldn't he .....

Fewer than one in five people request a Covid-19 test if they have symptoms, while the number who follow full self-isolation rules is low, a large study of the test and trace system has found. The report, published in the British Medical Journal, also found only half of people knew the main Covid symptoms. These include a cough, high temperature and loss of taste or smell.

Just 18% of those with coronavirus symptoms said they had requested a test, while 43% with symptoms in the previous seven days adhered to full self-isolation, the BMJ study found.

Men, younger people and those with young children were less likely to self-isolate, as were those from more working-class backgrounds, people experiencing greater financial hardship, and those working in key sectors. Common reasons for not fully self-isolating included needing to go to the shops or work, for a medical need other than Covid-19, to care for a vulnerable person, to exercise or meet others, or because symptoms were only mild or got better.

The findings are based on 74,697 responses to online surveys from 53,880 people aged 16 or older living in the UK. In total, 37 survey waves were carried out from 2 March last year to 27 January this year, with about 2,000 participants in each wave.

The report's authors, including from King's College London, said: "With such low rates for symptom recognition, testing, and full self-isolation, the effectiveness of the current form of the UK's test, trace, and isolate system is limited."

A Department for Health and Social Care spokesman said: "Since last May, NHS Test and Trace has contacted 3.2 million people who tested positive, and another 6.4 million of their contacts. Behind these numbers are countless lives saved and the latest ONS figures show that when people are asked to self-isolate, the overwhelming majority do so. It is vital that people continue to do their bit by isolating when they are asked to. As the prevalence of coronavirus falls, our testing and tracing system becomes more important in identifying and suppressing local outbreaks while also responding rapidly to the threat of new variants."

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he .....

BBC Panorama, Undercover: Inside the Covid Testing Lab on BBC iPlayer

The Milton Keynes Lighthouse Lab, which Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised as doing a “phenomenal amount of testing” last year, was found to be setting targets that staff said forced them to cut corners, with its own quality-control scientist warning some procedures were “garbage”.

BBC Panorama reporter Jacqui Wakefield, who filmed undercover at UK Biocentre laboratory in the Tilbrook area, for 18 shifts in January and February after being tipped off about alleged 'poor practices' at the lab, found technicians failed to check the barcodes of samples and their bags, potentially leading to wrong results and some people’s tests being ignored altogether.

She also found robotic machines, at the heart of the Government’s plan to return tests within 24 hours, dripped samples across testing plates, leading to the possibility of contamination.

Staff left swabs inside sample tubes, raising the possibility of them being infected, while other technicians were filmed routinely ignoring sample bags that arrived leaking.

“You’re told to speed up, speed up, speed up. It’s very easy to forget that there’s real people waiting at the end of this and what we do has consequences for those people” the undercover reporter said at the end of her last shift.

The laboratory’s official rules state that if contamination is suspected the run must be stopped, the system cleaned down and a new run started from scratch. However, while some technicians did pause the machine, others were filmed simply pushing the swabs back into their tubes.

The lab was also found to not be following strict Covid-19 secure measures, with social distancing poorly maintained and repeated outbreaks of coronavirus among staff.

The Health and Safety Executive inspected the facility last September, concluding that it was putting its workers at risk by failing to maintain sufficient cleaning and a lack of enforcement of social distancing.

Dr Tony Cox, chief executive at UK Biocentre, said: “
“This programme presents an incomplete and selective representation of our efforts. In fact, many of the allegations date from a time the lab was operating under a unique period of pressure at the start of this year due to the second wave of the pandemic. This month a Health and Safety inspection confirmed that the laboratory continues to implement safe operational practices to meet the guidelines of the HSE, and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service has recommended us for accreditation to ISO15189, a gold standard for quality and competence in medical testing laboratories.”

I watched part of that Panorama programme (and had to switch off I was so livid) and, if what the lab techs/assistants were saying is true then I'm gobsmacked at the management of the laboratory. Telling people to hurry up all the time and ignoring obvious problems are disasters waiting to happen in any laboratory let alone a medical test facility. If I had been working there as a lab tech, I'm afraid I would have had a shouting match with the management before walking out. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever, in this day and age, for such wanton breaches of test protocols and procedures.

I feel sorry for the techs and assistants. They must have felt bullied into just obeying orders and were frightened for their jobs if they said anything to the management.

I haven't seen the Panorama program, Percy but I'll try and see it on iPlayer later today.

One thing I do know is that labs were not geared up for pandemic testing and the existing procedures are written by (usually) compliance who are always risk averse and therefore turn simple tasks into bureaucratic processes that take an age to do. Due to the pandemic and the sheer volumes its hardly surprising the lab and its staff were overwhelmed.

That said, false test results would surprise me - unless samples are being mixed up, which, unfortunately, happens in most labs from time to time. In these situations, the paperwork is bigger than the test itself in a lot of cases so compounds the problems.

Lab techs are cool people though, I get on well with them, they are a mind of information, although they are super process driven and can't think outside the process. They are trained that way and asking them to change the way they work is a job in itself (believe me I've done this many times).