Both German and South Korean officials and experts have stressed the importance of mass testing behind their respective approaches to fighting the coronavirus.

The UK’s lab capacity dedicated to COVID-19, and the way those labs are structured, appears not to have been geared up enough to handle the scale of the pandemic.

Public Health England has expanded its testing capacity from one to 12 labs and is supporting the NHS to test at greater capacity in their 29 laboratory networks — which a spokesperson described as "the fastest deployment of a novel test to PHE and NHS labs in recent history, including in the Swine flu pandemic in 2009”.

But the UK has a more centralised approach to lab testing compared to Germany, and this has limited its ability to scale and process results at the same speed as other countries, despite its efforts to ramp up capacity.

“The roll-out of additional capacity requires properly trained staff, equipment and a supply of consumables as well as a thorough validation process for the lab to ensure the results are correct,” the PHE spokesperson added.

Explaining the UK’s setup, professor Sharon Peacock, the director of the national infection service at Public Health England (PHE), told a Science and Technology Committee hearing of MPs last week: “Laboratories in this country have largely been merged, so we have a smaller number of larger laboratories. The alternative is to have a single large testing site. From my perspective, it is more efficient to have a bigger testing site than dissipating our efforts into a lot of laboratories around the country.”

Greg Clark, the Tory MP who chairs the committee, told BuzzFeed News: "We have lots of labs in this country, we are scientifically a very well endowed country. We have many universities across the country, the vast majority of which have laboratories that can test, so it’s not that we have less capacity than others it's that we took an approach of having tests done in a very centralised way, first of all at a single laboratory and then rolled out to 12 public health laboratories and only recently involving hospital labs and others in universities."



He added: "Our resources are not significantly less than Germany and it wouldn’t surprise me if we were ahead of them but we didn’t deploy them until relatively late in the pandemic."

All positive tests in the UK were initially validated by one PHE lab in Colindale, north-west London, though a PHE spokesperson said that was no longer the case.

The UK approach to testing was revised as the virus spread. When the first few coronavirus cases hit the UK in January, Public Health England began a strict programme of contact tracing and testing potential cases. This early testing enabled the UK to “gain 3 or 4 weeks on Italy”, according to a source familiar with the government’s approach.

This was similar to the more aggressive efforts that are continuing in Germany, South Korea and elsewhere. But the UK policy changed after a few weeks when Britain started to run out of testing kits and lab capacity, and its senior government scientists moved from what they called the “contain” phase to the “delay phase”, the source said.

Instead of testing, the UK government decided to prioritise intensive care unit and ventilator capacity at hospitals, believing that this was the best way to save the lives of those worst affected by the disease, rather than widespread tests, two sources told BuzzFeed News.

Prioritising ICU capacity and ventilator procurement over testing was the right strategy, the second source argued, because while data on overall cases may be useful overall, it is a secondary concern compared to ensuring the elderly and vulnerable can receive treatment.

Although the UK is now increasing testing following widespread criticism, that new capacity will be focused primarily on NHS workers so they can keep working, rather than the general population, one of the sources said. Data from the areas hardest hit by the outbreak, such as Italy and Spain, shows that frontline health workers are among the worst affected.

Speaking at Tuesday evening's government press conference, deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries confirmed that the UK would prioritise its testing on NHS clinicians rather than the wider public. Most of those who would test positive would not require treatment, Harries said, so it would not be the best use of resources.

At the science committee last week, Imperial College professor Neil Ferguson, who has been a key adviser to the government on the COVID-19, explained: "Testing has always been discussed significantly. The reason it was not included in initial modelling was about the projections by PHE of how quickly this country could ramp up testing capacity.

“If we have to transit from the suppression strategy and the lockdown strategy to something this country can maintain long term, undoubtedly much more widespread testing, contact tracing and other methods will have to be deployed.

“If we are talking about back in January/February/early March, it was very clear from messages from Public Health England that we would have nowhere near enough testing capacity to adopt that strategy."

This testimony was endorsed by one of the health sources who spoke to BuzzFeed News. The UK had a “massive shortage of tests”, they said, and was simply unable to replicate the testing capabilities of other countries at the moment.