LONDON (UK) – British health minister Matt Hancock said that ‘test and trace’ cannot control coronavirus in the same way as a mass testing, found more effective. He defended the performance of the heavily criticised contact-tracing system.
“The test and trace programme, ahead of the second lockdown, was functioning to reduce transmission enormously,” Hancock told lawmakers.
“By the time of the second lockdown, it had already broken the chains of transmission hundreds of thousands of times.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised a “world-beating” test and trace system. However, he has not admitted that, while it is improving, the system has failed to meet expectations.
Hancock did not stress on the centrality of test and trace to the government’s aim of containing the virus. He added that mass testing of the population would help do that.
“Test and trace on its own cannot keep the virus under control,” he said. “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.”
Hancock talked about the need to “stitch” together national and local aspects of test and trace, and he also defended the role of the private sector in the system.
“I’ll put on the record … my thanks for all those working in the private sector contact-tracing because I really dislike it when people try to do them down,” he said.