It’s not just testing that is failing, contact tracing is broken too

Getty Images / ODD ANDERSEN / Contributor The UK’s Covid-19 testing system is in disarray. All other cases are marked as “non-complex” and these people are contacted by NHS Test and Trace and asked to give details of everyone they’ve had close contact with recently. "You have to test sufficient numbers of people with symptoms, you then have to trace sufficient numbers of their contacts and isolate combinations of everybody who is positive in order to keep the virus out,” says Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths, a senior research fellow at University College London and the author of a paper that modelled how different levels of contact tracing would impact the spread of the virus when schools reopened. Between the launch of NHS Test and Trace on May 28 and September 2, contact tracers were only able to reach 42.5 per cent of the identified non-complex close contacts of cases in Bradford. In Blackburn with Darwen, which is the fifth worst-hit region currently, contact tracers only reached 48 per cent of identified close contacts.