The U.K. government has claimed that it has achieved its target of daily COVID-19 tests with a capacity of about 200,000 towards the end of May.
The United Kingdom Prime Minister, Boris Johnson had set a target 200,000 tests per day in the early days of the month, but it was later revealed that this had referred the main operational capacity and not the tests performed.
Recently, about 205,634 tests had been made available and have been able to meet the daily target as per the government. However, it has not released the figures for all the tests that have been carried out.
The experts had questioned if the theoretical capacity target had been a useful way of assessing the efficacy and adequacy of the testing to back the newly revealed track and trace program.
As per the Department of Health figures, about 127,722 diagnostic tests had been conducted recently, out of which around 165,634 were made available. There had also been more capacities of 40,000 antibody tests that were made available to the social care and NHS staff.
The government has been unable to reveal the figures for the number of antibody tests that have been carried out till now. However, the NHS pathology labs have been given certain targets for being able to perform about thousands of tests every single day.
The capacity for testing has been reported by the laboratories basing it on their assessments regarding what can be delivered with the help of the available equipment and the workforce.
University of Edinburgh’s chair of public global health, Prof Devi Sridhar said that the firm needs to keep more focus on getting local systems in place for the conduction of testing and even tracing or isolating and be less focused on targets.
Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary said that reaching up to 200,000 capacity target is a crucial milestone for the journey to curb the virus spread and save lives, leading to a gradual easing of lockdowns.
Source Credit- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/covid-19-tests-exceed-200000-per-day-target-government-claims