Extending testing is a tacit admission that the Government blundered fatally by failing to follow countries such as Germany and South Korea.
Because of their focus on testing, those countries have far lower Covid-19 death rates.
It is a relief Health Secretary Matt Hancock is finally heading in the right direction.
But with Britain on course to record the worst loss of life in Europe, it doesn’t get him or Boris Johnson off the hook for their previous terrible mistakes.
Testing care-home staff and residents should have started weeks ago.
The move to restart tracing those who come into contact with infected people is a further admission that the strategy should never have been abandoned in the first place.
Support for what the Government finally gets right is tempered by the knowledge that its slowness and errors were killers.
Secret is out
Publishing daily coronavirus care- home and community death tolls is long overdue and will expose a dirty secret.
The Government turned many care homes into death traps by parachuting in hospital patients without tests while staff were denied adequate supplies of PPE.
It is chilling that care-home deaths doubled in a week and account for a third of a real total much higher than the 21,678 in hospitals that has been acknowledged.
Death rates are higher in care homes than elsewhere because of the age, condition and vulnerability of those living in them.
But letting coronavirus rip through them was another fatal Government mistake.
Puff daddy
Happy 75th birthday to Thomas the Tank Engine, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s gift to generations of children.
The old train feels newer than some of the ones rattling along Britain’s lines, and the Fat Controller is cheaper than the fat cats profiting from a privatised network.
