LONDON (Reuters) – British health minister Matt Hancock said that ‘test and trace’ cannot control the coronavirus in the way that an effective system of mass testing can, as he defended the performance of the heavily criticised contact tracing system.
The test and trace system was inefficient and slow, Reuters found after speaking to tracers and analysing the data, making it inadequate to avoid a second wave and a new English national lockdown which started on Nov 5.
“The test and trace programme, ahead of the second lockdown was functioning, to reduce transmission, and by the time of the second lockdown, it already broken the chains of transmission hundreds of thousands of times,” Hancock told lawmakers.
“Test and trace on its own and cannot keep the virus under control… I think that mass testing does have that ability to do that in a way that testing all the symptomatic people, and then contact tracing, finds it much harder to do.”
(Reporting by Alistair Smout)
