Ticking boxes2 Apr 2020 01:23
"A single guiding hand would have registered the absurdity of a British company called Novacyt exporting millions of pounds of coronavirus tests to more than 80 countries, because the UK supposedly doesn't have enough laboratories to use them. Of course it does!......Many medical experts blame PHE's reluctance to accept help on a mixture of control freakery and incompetence among senior staff.
For example, whereas other countries weeks ago took the sensible decision to relax the rules on which laboratories can carry out coronavirus tests, in order to get as many as possible done, PHE chose to follow a tightly controlled approach.
Initially, it therefore insisted that all testing in the UK was done at its own lab in north London. This contrasts vividly with the approach in Germany, where both private and publicly-owned laboratories have been testing relentlessly since the start of the crisis.
Tim Colbourn, associate professor of global health epidemiology at University College London, has called for PHE to now hand over control to local authorities and private sector providers. 'All the national capacity needs to be used for this effort,' he said. 'You could ramp it up a hundredfold… This is a national emergency.' PHE seems, however, to be more interested in ticking boxes"