The Government's pledge to perform 25,000 coronavirus tests a day has unravelled into a fiasco.
The country is still struggling to test 10,000 people a day for Covid-19 nationwide, weeks after the pandemic reached British shores.
Meanwhile Germany is conducting 50,000 tests a day and the country has a much lower death rate than that of the UK.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has urged countries to 'test, test, test' to try and get on top of the outbreak.
On Wednesday 10,657 tests were carried out in the UK with the capacity for 12,799.
But numbers overall remain low and yesterday No10 said just 2,000 frontline NHS staff, out of 500,000 in England, have been tested since the outbreak began.
As of 5pm on Wednesday the overall number of deaths from the virus in the UK was 2,921.
The fact that the number is currently low and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future can be explained by the following reasons.
Communication breakdown 'reduces testing capacity by tens of thousands'
A breakdown in communication between Public Health England (PHE) and the government's animal health agency may have reduced the UK's testing capacity by tens of thousands per week, it has been claimed.
Employees at Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) have been in discussion with PHE for more than two months about supporting testing efforts, reports BuzzFeed News.
The news website reports that they have seen evidence of PHE sending APHA, which tests diseases among animals, conflicting information about recruiting and training scientists.
One APHA scientist told BuzzFeed News: “We’re not even getting a consistent message about what they want us to do,” adding that the miscommunication with PHE was “appalling”.
'Herd immunity' strategy suggested by Government
As the coronavirus outbreak began to worsen in early March members of the Government's 'nudge unit' appeared to favour a strategy of herd immunity.
Dr David Halpern, a psychologist who heads the Behavioural Insights Team, said on BBC News: “There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population.”
To reach herd immunity, about 60% of the population would need to get ill and become immune, according to Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser.
Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious disease at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “I do worry that making plans that assume such a large proportion of the population will become infected (and hopefully recovered and immune) may not be the very best that we can do.”
Within a week the 'herd immunity' strategy was scrapped and replaced with 'suppression' with social-distancing measures quickly ramped up.
Speaking to BBC Newsnight former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who had earlier criticised the 'herd immunity' strategy said: “We changed our strategy a couple of weeks ago from the herd immunity strategy to the suppression strategy.”
Government pledge to perform 10,000 tests a day
On March 18 - roughly six weeks after the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the UK - the Government pledged that 10,000 tests a day would be performed by the week after.
That target was finally reached on April 1 when 10,657 tests were carried out.
Also on March 18, the Government said that 25,000 tests a day would be carried out 'within four weeks'.
There's no indication that they will be able to reach that target but today Prof Paul Cosford of Public Health England (PHE) said that testing would hit 15,000 per day "imminently".
Government U-turn on the importance of testing
Last week England's deputy chief medical officer Jenny Harries said: "There comes a point in a pandemic when (testing of every case) is not an appropriate intervention and that is the point where we moved.
“Although we still do some contact tracing and testing, for example in high-risk areas like prisons and care homes, that is not an appropriate mechanism as we go forward.”
However in a video message on Twitter on Wednesday evening, Mr Johnson said that increased screening would be how the UK defeats the coronavirus.
"I want to say a special word about testing, because it is so important, and as I have said for weeks and weeks, this is the way through," he said.
"This is how we will unlock the coronavirus puzzle. This is how we will defeat it in the end."
At roughly the same time the prime minister's video was being posted on Twitter on Wednesday night, Jonathan Van Tam, also a deputy chief medical officer, told ITV's Robert Peston that testing was a "side issue" for reducing deaths.
Muddled facts on NHS frontline staff testing
On Wednesday the government said 2,000 NHS staff had been tested - despite claims more than 100,000 are off sick or self-isolating.
On Thursday Downing Street clarified that the testing number was in fact higher than previously said.
No10 said there were actually two strands of testing for NHS staff - drive-through tests, which have now tested 2,800 staff, plus testing within NHS labs of frontline staff.
The government claimed that this second section has tested a "significant number" of NHS staff, but said the numbers will only be set out in full later on Thursday.
Meanwhile, a new lab in Milton Keynes has now started taking samples from NHS staff, No10 claimed.
Downing Street said nearly 100 universities, companies and research institutes agreed to lend their machines for the Milton Keynes effort and "not a single institution that was asked refused”.
Spare capacity to be used on NHS staff
Government ministers said on Tuesday night that they would finally start using spare capacity to test NHS staff, after even the UK's limited testing capacity went unfilled despite enormous demand.
It's understood the gap between coronavirus testing capacity and actual tests was due to a 15% cap on staff tests, with 85% reserved for patients.
When medics were unable to fill the 85% patient quota, testing capacity went unused.
With testing capacity increasing, Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the NHS to remove the cap, so all spare capacity can be used for staff and families from Wednesday.
'Dunkirk-like effort' needed to increase test numbers dramatically
Sir Paul Nurse, chief executive of the Francis Crick research institute - which will soon be able to conduct 500 Covid-19 tests a day - said a Dunkirk-style effort was needed to co-ordinate smaller laboratories and increase test numbers.
"We are a lot of little boats and the little boats can be effective," he said, referring to the evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of the French city during World War Two.
He added: "The government has put some big boats, destroyers in place. That's a bit more cumbersome to get working and we wish them all the luck to do that, but we little boats can contribute as well."
A lack of materials and lab space
A global shortage of key chemicals called reagents is hampering the production of tests, No10 claimed this week.
According to the British In Vitro Diagnostic Association, companies are working to meet demand, but the chemicals needed for different testing machines are different and the production complex.
While reagent supply issues were sighted by Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, as a reason for the slow production of tests, this claimed was thrown into doubt on Tuesday.
The Chemical Industries Association, which represents the UK’s substantial chemicals industry, told ITV that there was no shortage.
What is certain however, is the fact that too little lab space has been designated for scientists to look at the tests.
At first, Public Health England was only using its own eight laboratories.
This has been expanded to 40 NHS labs, meaning 48 labs in total are now operational.
No test is better than a bad test
Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has issued a note of caution about rushing out tests that are not ready.
“One thing worse than no test is a bad test," arguing that an infected doctor or nurse falsely given the all clear could spread the virus through a large portion of a hospital.
Some scientists have argued that the Government's stringent guidelines when it comes to testing standards, as well as types of reagents and chemicals, needed to be relaxed.
“It is holding things up,” Professor Nicola Stonehouse, a molecular virologist at Leeds University, told The Guardian.
“If we could get over this, we could get the testing centres up and running so much faster, and that’s got to be a good thing."
How is the Government planning to rectify this?
Today Matt Hancock said that he would be "pressing the accelerator" on coronavirus testing before unveiling a five-point plan that he claimed would see the UK eventually reach 100,000 tests a day.
Part of the plan is to harness the capabilities of the UK private sector.
In a conference call with manufacturers, inventors and commercial developers last night, the Health Secretary asked them to urgently create a major UK diagnostic capability, in line with that in Germany.
When asked about the details of the plan, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's spokesman said that following complaints of shortages, the NHS had developed a new specification for the swabs used to carry out the tests which had been validated and shared with potential manufacturers.
"We think that provides us with a way forward to complete hundreds of thousands of tests," he said.
Following the opening of a large-scale testing laboratory in Milton Keynes in just a week, the spokesman said two more would be opening next week in Cheshire and Glasgow to cover the north of England and Scotland.
At the same time, the spokesman said the Government was working with nine potential suppliers on developing an antibody test which would show whether people have had the virus.
