Contact tracers working for local health authorities have managed to reach nearly 98 per cent of people who test positive for coronavirus to self-isolate, according to new figures.
The success rate of local contact tracers in England is in stark contrast with the call centre staff, who could only manage to reach about 57 per cent of the coronavirus sufferers they were supposed to contact.
The figures cover an entire 11-week span of the coronavirus Test and Trace programme so far for which figures are available, from May 28 to August 12.
Some 57,457 people who tested positive for Covid-19 in England have been transferred to the NHS Test and Trace, Department of Health and Social Care figures showed.
Of these, contact tracers reached 45,037 and asked them to provide details of recent contacts, while 10,827 were not reached. A further 1,593 could not be reached because their communication details had not been provided.
Meanwhile since the launch of Test and Trace, 227,577 close contacts of people who have tested positive for Covid-19 have been reached through the tracing system and asked to self-isolate.
Those figures represent 81 per cent out of a total of 281,118 people identified as close contacts.
The remaining 53,541 people - or 19 per cent - were were not reached despite identifying as close contacts.
The weekly figures show that 71.3 per cent of close contacts were reached in the week ending August 12, down from 74.2 per cent in the previous week.
It came as figures showed that just 60.5 per cent of people who were tested for Covid-19 in the week ending August 12 at a regional site or mobile testing unit – a so-called “in-person” test – got a result back within 24 hours.
This is down from 70.3 per cent in the previous week. Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised the results of all in-person tests would be back within 24 hours by the end of June.
