Doctors warn the UK will face an inevitable second peak of Covid
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Doctors warn that the second peak of Covid will come within a month unless the Prime Minister sorts out the Test and Trace fiasco.
Dr. Chaand Nagpaul, British Medical Association council chair, said: « We want to avoid a return to the scenes in April when hospitals were full ». About 86% of medics said a second peak was quite or very likely, and the 8,000 medics polled by the British Medical Association said a functioning Test and Trace system is vital to avoid this.
However, Boris Johnson has described the scheme as “world-beating”: it has a backlog of 185,000 swabs and is so overstretched tests that are being sent to labs in Italy and Germany. People call it Sunday scheme. BMA council chairman told that the results expose the fears of frontline clinicians, fears from experiences of treating patients with Covid and watching, the first time, as the virus spread with alarming speed while the Government delayed efforts to overcome it.
Medics want above all to avoid a return to the scenes they saw in April.
Unable to book online or get a test near home with the current testing: a lot of people had to travel long distances to centres whether some finding swabs were not available after driving more than 100 miles. More than 60% polled by the BMA agreed the failure of Test and Trace would be a significant factor in a fresh peak, and 80% said a fit-for-purpose system would have a major impact in preventing a second wave.
Infection rates have increased in recent days, with 3,330 cases recorded on Sunday, It makes three days topping 3,000 in consecutive. A Department of Health reports most British labs are clearing fewer tests than stated capacity, due to “chaos” in supply chains. While the Government claims that the capacity is for 375,000 a day, the actual number stalled to just 437,000 a week, at the start of the month. It is equivalent to 62,000 a day. However, there are no tests available on the online booking system Thursday to Saturday.
Professor Sir Chris Ham, ex-chief executive of the King’s Fund, said one of the main reasons for the fiasco was using private firms and added: « It was a mistake to outsource contact tracing to Serco and other companies rather than invest in local authorities and directors of public health who know communities… There hasn’t been a plan, a coherent strategy, which sets out what is the Government aiming to do ».
A Government spokesperson said: « We have made significant strides in stopping the spread of coronavirus. This includes delivering 3.3 billion items of PPE to the frontline with 31 billion items ordered, NHS Test and Trace testing hundreds of thousands of people every day, and almost 360,000 people contacted who may have been unwittingly spreading the virus » and added that the Prime Minister has announced a further £3 billion winter funding for the National Health Service to relieve winter pressures on A&E and provide additional capacity for it. This is on top of a record cash boost worth £33.9 billion extra by 2023/24.
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