Recommendation 178

The lack of data resulting from suspending community testing also affected the UK’s understanding of the disease at that critical time. Professor Neil Ferguson explained to the Science and Technology Committee in June 2020 that low testing capacity meant it was difficult to estimate the proportion of imported cases which had been missed: at the time we had a policy of trying to screen people at borders, and we estimated then that maybe two thirds of imported cases had been missed. What we now know, because the epidemic took off in Italy and Spain before anybody had realised, is that probably 90% of cases imported into this country were missed by those border measures, because we were not checking people. […] Had we had the testing capacity […] screening everybody with symptoms coming in would have given us a much better impression of where infection was coming from.262 260 Oral evidence taken before the Science and Technology Committee on 25 March 2020, HC (2019–21) 136, Q20 261 Q319 and Q323 262 Oral evidence taken before the Science and Technology Committee on 10 June 2020, HC (2019–21) 136, Q870, Q873 64 Coronavirus: lessons learned to date Arguably this lack of data could have contributed to the delay in the critical decision to instigate a nationwide lockdown. As Professor Chris Whitty explained: because we had very limited testing capacity, we did not realise quite how far along the curve we were, because we were having to use people in intensive care and who had sadly died, which is quite a late event. If we had the capacity on testing then that we have now, we would have come to very different conclusions using exactly the same science.263 Professor Whitty suggested that one key lesson was to “build our capacity to do testing […] at scale”, which he described would be “a problem with any pandemic we have in the future”.264 Impact on health and social care