Recommendation 164

This Chapter looks at a number of different facets of the test, trace and isolate system— though they are illustrative rather than exhaustive. While it describes an unsatisfactory history, there are signs that the UK has now arrived at a more dependable outcome: the UK now has, in principle, the ability to test more than 800,000 people a day, and in the week commencing 23 August 2021 there were more than 5.6 million tests carried out in England, more than any EU/EEA country.244 But there are many lessons to be learned on the way and this notional capacity has yet to be fully tested in action.