What's behind Britain's coronavirus testing disaster?

Britain’s system of testing for the virus that causes Covid-19 collapsed just when we needed it most. What went wrong?

Dido Harding © JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images
Harding: failed to foresee the inevitable
(Image credit: © JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

What has happened?

Britain’s coronavirus testing system has seized up just as it is desperately needed – now, during the long-predicted resurgence in Covid-19 cases following the summer lull. As headteachers, NHS bosses and business leaders have been warning for months, the post-holiday return to school and work has meant both a surge in Covid infections and a leap in demand for tests due to the seasonal surge in colds and flu. But the government’s testing system (somewhat cynically badged as “NHS” Test and Trace, despite being run by Serco and an opaque web of subcontractors) has failed to keep up. The surge in Covid cases has come a month or more earlier than the government thought. And it seems no one in government had quite realised that schools going back would mean a surge in testing demand from ill people – staff and pupils – required to test negative for Covid before being let back. In addition, they didn’t anticipate a spike in demand from returning holiday-makers.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.