Expert says university and big hospital labs can be used to reach German levels of testing

The UK has the capacity to process tens of thousands more tests for coronavirus but has failed to organise itself properly, a former director at the World Health Organization has said.

Anthony Costello, a global health professor at University College London, called for the UK to make use of testing machines in every university and big hospital around the country, setting up mobile testing units like Ireland, which is testing far more people per head of population.

There is growing political concern that the UK was still only managing to test 5,000 people a day by Sunday morning, despite aims to increase tests to 10,000 and then 25,000 a day - which is still far short of the 70,000 a day that Germany is managing.

Critics are also questioning the UK’s decision only to test people in hospitals and NHS workers, arguing that a return to testing more widely will ultimately be necessary to suppress the virus.

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Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Costello said a policy of mass community testing was essential to identify new hotspots and eventually end the lockdown, as has happened in South Korea.

“We have 44 molecular virology labs in the UK. If they were doing 400 tests a day we would be up to Germany levels of testing and that is perfectly feasible. Public Health England (PHE) was slow and controlled and only allowed non-PHE labs to start testing two weeks ago but that was only after the strategy shift to end community testing,” he said.

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“If you look at Korea, they have done 490,000 tests. Their death rate is three per million and they have suppressed the virus.

“I don’t see why we can’t get these 44 labs up and running, finding cases and testing.

“We must go to mass testing and when we remove the lockdown – all the Asian states it was six to eight weeks, even in Wuhan – then we will have a control mechanism which will enable us to wait, without socially distancing the whole country, for drugs or a vaccine for herd immunity.”

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, was asked whether the UK planned to move to mass testing at some point in order to end the lockdown.

He said it was important to increase testing for current cases of the virus but an antibody test was also important to let people know if they were immune after contracting the virus.

“Hugely increased testing is part of it, but there is a second type of testing which will be very significant when we get there, which is the antibody testing, which will tell us whether you have had it in the past. That will enable us to say you can come out of the lockdown.”

He said the global nature of the pandemic meant to scale up testing had been a “military operation”.