UK to switch tracing strategy on Covid-19 after national scheme falters |

[bhaigan]

More than two months after Boris Johnson promised a “world-beating” NHS “test and trace” system to tackle the spread of Covid-19, ministers have finally been forced to row back on their centralized and national approach.

On Monday, following sustained calls from health experts and politicians to give more powers to local authorities with regional expertise and boots on the ground, the Department of Health and Social Care announced that “ringfenced” teams of national contact tracers would be assigned to councils in England from later this month.

At the same time it dismissed 6,000 contact tracers, reducing the national tracing army from 18,000 to 12,000, in a move designed to address multiple reports of tracers sitting idle while new outbreaks of the virus took hold in England’s north west and midlands regions.

One contact tracer, a doctor working at a center in London until last week, told the Financial Times that after 44 shifts and 273 hours of work, she had not made a single call. She pointed to numerous glitches in the system, such as incorrect dates of births, duplicated records, patients who did not exist, and people who had never had Covid-19.

[Pitta]