Recommendation 166

During the early days of the pandemic, the Government believed—and told the public—that testing for covid-19 was a field in which the UK had a leading position. This assessment was shared, and possibly arose out of, the views of scientific advisers. The minutes of the very first SAGE meeting on covid-19 on 22 January 2020 stated: 243 On 2 April 2020, when the Government announced its new 5-pillar testing strategy, 4,522 Covid-19 cases were recorded. 244 GOV.UK, ‘Coronavirus in the UK: Testing’; European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, ‘Data on testing for COVID-19 by week and country’. Coronavirus: lessons learned to date 61 The UK currently has good centralised diagnostic capacity for WN-CoV [covid-19]–and is days away from a specific test, which is scalable across the UK in weeks.245 The following day, on 23 January 2020, the then Secretary of State for Health and Social Care told the House that the UK is “one of the first countries to have developed a world-leading test for the new coronavirus.”246 When the Prime Minister claimed to have “growing confidence that we will have a test, track and trace operation that will be world-beating,” it may be that this early lead was what he had in mind.247 However, it rapidly became apparent that the scientific expertise in identifying the virus and the ability to deploy that operationally were very different. Public Health England was initially responsible for managing covid-19 testing as well as the scientific development of a test for covid-19, but it is in the former that its deficiencies were exposed.