ANALYSIS: 50,000 COVID-19 deaths and rising. How Britain failed to stop the second wave

50,000 COVID-19 deaths and rising. How the UK keeps failing. With one of the highest death tolls from the first wave of the coronavirus, Boris Johnson pledged a “world-beating” test-and-trace system to prevent a resurgence this winter. A Reuters investigation reveals how that promise came unstuck. Reuters

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an investigation by Reuters has exposed how lessons from the first wave were not learned, and why England once again was forced into a drastic lockdown. New measures were put in place – a rapid increase in testing capacity, for example. But the government’s failure to share full data on the disease’s spread with local authorities and the public gave a false impression of success. This concealed what one health expert called an “iceberg” of infection and led to a relaxation of social restrictions too soon in some places.

And while tests and contact tracing expanded, they did so in such an inefficient way that they couldn’t keep pace with the spread of the virus. A Reuters analysis reveals that England has managed to trace just one non-household contact – someone who doesn’t live with the infected person – for every two identified cases of COVID-19. That compares to over 20 contacts for each single case in Singapore and Taiwan, according to studies.

The reason for this dysfunction, Reuters reporting shows, lies in a disjointed design and a government preference, contrary to some expert advice, for national solutions over targeted, local responses.

“This is not the system that I would design from what I understand about it now,” said David Heymann, a world authority on contact tracing and the first chairman of Public Health England, the government agency charged with leading the response to pandemics. A system to tackle the pandemic needs to be locally centred, said Heymann. “Face-to face trust is what’s important...You can’t do contact tracing from a central location to be effective.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care, Britain’s health ministry, denied that the government’s response to COVID-19 was failing. Since the start of the pandemic, the spokesman said, “we have worked rapidly to build the biggest testing system per head of population of all the major countries in Europe.” The tracing system was helping to stop the spread of the virus and had asked more than two million people to self-isolate, the spokesman added.

At the start of the summer, as the first wave of COVID-19 retreated, scientists told the government what was now required: a system to suppress any new outbreaks quickly. At its centre, scientists said, should be contact tracing: detective work to locate outbreaks and find and quarantine any potential new cases.

Asia-Pacific countries such as China, South Korea, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand had shown how rapid, local and intrusive steps can be effective in extinguishing outbreaks. But such work is intensive. It needs to happen at lightning speed and people need to isolate when told to do so. ...