Many will be aware that Germany has been testing for the coronavirus on a far greater scale than the rest of Europe and the UK. The way in which the country has managed to scale up its testing capacity has been remarkable. The effort is of note because of the speed at which it has been accomplished.
Countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, which have combined mass-testing with highly effective contact tracing. However, as a result of SARS, these countries have been preparing for a new respiratory disease such as that caused by the coronavirus for many years. Germany, however, appears to have simply responded rapidly to an unexpected and sudden global health crisis.
The President of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute has stated that Germany now has the capacity to conduct up to 500,000 tests per week. In contrast, the UK government announced on 11 March that it hoped to increase testing to a total of 10,000 PCR tests daily in the following week, but the current figures from the Department of Health and Social Care show that the UK has been carrying out between 5,000-8,000 tests per day on average.
A Berlin-based biotech TIB has led the German testing drive. The UK does have private companies that could have fulfilled a similar role. The UK is the base for the global diagnostics firm and manufacturer, Randox. It was not until the 18th of March that the Times reported Sir Patrick Vallance and Public Health England hoped to mobilise the private sector and to expand testing “so we can get things out there fast on the community side”.
The UK is a world leader in scientific research and biotechnological industry. The UK does not lack microbiological laboratories. Public Health England has a number of public health laboratories which provide a number of centres of regional excellence. In addition to this The Scottish NHS provides a further 13 specialist labs in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness.
All of these facts lean to the conclusion that the UK’s problem in scaling up it’s testing at the same rate as others appears not to be that it lacks resources, but that it doesn’t quite have the right structures in place to mobilise them. Public Health England has a far wider than the immunology and virology remit of the RKI in Germany. PHE commitments include but are not limited too “promoting healthier lifestyles” as well as providing a “specialist workforce” for “immunisation and screening programmes”. Lessons need to be learned.
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Current Affairs Correspondent | My name is Oliver Down I am 22, and a staunch brexiteer. I am a Bristolian lad who studied politics in Leicester. I believe in free speech and accurate journalism and I won’t be afraid to give you “the other side” of the story!
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