Special Report: Into the fog - How Britain lost track of the coronavirus

[June 29, 2020]  By Stephen Grey, Andrew MacAskill, Ryan McNeill, Steve Stecklow and Tommy Wilkes

LONDON (Reuters) - On Friday, Feb. 21, Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Public Health England, was in a cheerful mood. It was near the end of the school half-term holiday.

He wrote on an official blog that there had been no new positive cases of the new coronavirus that week in the United Kingdom. It was a "testament," he said, "to the robust infection control measures" and the "diagnostic and testing work" at laboratories nationwide.

Selbie, who joked when he took his then £185,000-a-year job in 2013 that his public health credentials could be fitted "on a postage stamp," headed a government agency with a mission to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies. He was now facing an epochal one.

Public Health England (PHE) is a cornerstone of the UK's state-run health system; Selbie reports directly to the government's health minister, Matt Hancock.

The agency is much smaller and has a lower profile than the vast National Health Service (NHS) that oversees Britain's hospitals, clinics and general practitioners, providing healthcare to all. Public Health England's 5,500 staff have an important supporting role running laboratories, developing tests for new infections and managing outbreaks in England, home to 56 million of the UK's 67 million people.

Even as Selbie posted his blog, all was not well. Reuters estimates that across the UK between 1,500 and 5,000 people may already have been infected with the coronavirus. The estimate is based on current scientific assessments of the fatality rate from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and an average interval from infection to death of between 18 and 23 days.

Within five weeks of Selbie's blog, Britain had hit the peak of an outbreak that has caused at least 43,000 deaths so far, according to the official toll. This compares to 35,000 in Italy, the first country in Europe to be severely affected, or nearly 9,000 in Germany, where, in the early days, the spread of infection appeared similar to Britain. With the exception only of Belgium, Britain has the highest per-capita mortality rate from COVID-19 among major economies, Reuters data show.

As Reuters has reported previously, Britain was slow to impose lockdown measures. That delay was costly. Professor Neil Ferguson, a disease modelling expert from Imperial College, London, has said that introducing lockdown measures a week earlier "would have reduced the final death toll by at least half."

Now, a Reuters investigation reveals further missteps and failures by officials and government agencies, including Selbie's Public Health England, in testing, tracking and tracing. Among decisions that doctors and epidemiologists say cost lives were:

• Failure to build up capacity to perform mass tests for COVID-19.

• Deciding on a narrower definition of COVID-19 than used by the World Health Organization and other countries.

• A decision to abandon testing of most people who didn't require hospitalization, and failure, early on, to create any way to track infection.

• A decision to abandon a programme of widespread "contact tracing," in which people in contact with an infected person were traced and told to isolate to stop the outbreak spreading.

• Deciding to share almost no details about the location of infections with local public health officials or the public.

• Fragmenting local responsibility for public health.

"Every mistake that was made did, unfortunately, cost lives," said Professor Tim Spector, an epidemiologist at King's College London.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said his government followed scientific advice at all times. Ministers point out that from mid-April, the UK dramatically increased the number of tests carried out and recruited thousands of contact tracers to control outbreaks.

In a statement, Public Health England chief executive Selbie told Reuters his agency's work had helped to save lives. "Beating this virus was always going to be a marathon not a sprint," Selbie said. "It remains our sole focus and we have done our absolute best with all our available resources."

Still, as the country began emerging from its lockdown this month, there was another blow to the government. It was forced to delay until at least autumn a contact-tracing app that it had hoped would be a game changer in tracking the virus and averting a second wave of infection. It emerged the app didn't work properly with iPhones.

INTO THE FOG

Once it surfaced, the virus spread rapidly in Britain. Infections peaked weeks earlier than the authorities expected not just in England, but in all parts of the UK.

England's Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, the government's top health adviser, recently conceded, "Many of the problems we had came because we were unable to actually work out exactly where we were, and we were trying to see our way through the fog."

Several senior doctors, who led the response to COVID-19 at major hospitals, told Reuters the fog was partly a result of early decisions by Whitty and other advisers that restricted testing for the virus. The doctors asked not to be named because they were not authorised by the NHS to speak publicly.

Public Health England had two main ways of monitoring and controlling the virus: a programme of testing and one of contact tracing to track down the contacts of anyone with the infection. These methods depended on what doctors call a "case definition," the description of what a COVID-19 case looks like, to determine who should be tested.

In early February, the World Health Organization listed eight symptoms for COVID-19, including nausea and vomiting. In Germany, the government's disease-control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, said doctors should use their judgment in ordering tests and it encouraged tests even for those with "unspecified general symptoms," meaning mild symptoms.

Britain took a different course. Whitty and his colleagues adopted a narrower view, defining COVID-19 symptoms as only a sharp new cough, fever or shortness of breath. Britain clung to this definition through the peak of the outbreak. It was not updated until May 18 – after 34,796 deaths – when a loss of taste and smell was added to the symptom list.

Spector, the King's College professor, said Britain's refusal to recognize more symptoms created space for the virus to spread. Because testing was restricted to people exhibiting the UK's narrow range of symptoms, many cases likely went unnoticed and the virus spread unchecked.

"The country that invented epidemiology was the only one that had no surveillance programme and no idea what was going on in their own country," he told Reuters.

Several senior doctors said they had pleaded with the authorities to expand the case definition. But they got nowhere.

One London consultant said a Public Health England laboratory refused to accept test samples from patients who didn't meet the UK definition. Asked if this was true, a Public Health England spokesman said: "That is right, but there is nothing unusual in this. Lab testing capacity was used to establish whether people that met the case definition had the virus."

Britain also restricted testing in other ways. At first it would test only those who had come into contact with confirmed cases and those with symptoms who had travelled from Wuhan, China, the origin of the outbreak, then from February 1 the rest of China, and six days later from other parts of Asia. Parts of Italy, the first European country to be badly hit by the virus, and Iran were added on February 25. Others were excluded.

"We were testing all these people with a cough from China and parts of Asia," said one senior doctor at a London teaching hospital, but meanwhile cases from other countries passed unnoticed.

Community testing in London, using the narrow guidelines, found only roughly 50 positive cases among some 5,000 tested by mid-March, another infectious disease specialist doctor in the capital said. Reuters has estimated that more than 18,000 Londoners were or had been infected with the virus by the end of February.

"A lot of us felt it was looking for a needle in a haystack," this doctor said.

A large genetic study would later show that most UK infections had come from Europe, not Asia. Beginning in early February, the virus strain could be traced back to Italy, then Spain and France, a team from the University of Oxford and University of Edinburgh found.

Many frontline doctors believe the disease was carried home to Britain from Europe's ski resorts. The biggest influx was when families returned from their half-term break, shortly after Selbie's February 21 blog post that celebrated recording no further cases.

Public Health England told Reuters it didn't set policy. The Department of Health and Social Care, Britain's health ministry, said the case definition was set by the government's top medical advisers, based on scientific advice. The definition was continually reviewed, the ministry said. "The symptoms selected were those that captured those most likely to have COVID-19, while not capturing a great number of people who did not," the department said in a response to Reuters.

In Scotland, which followed the same UK-wide case definition, there were also far more early cases than realised. In the Glasgow region, for instance, Reuters calculated there were at least 200 cases by the end of February. But, according to official data, there were no cases.

(GRAPHIC: How the coronavirus spread undetected in the UK - https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/BRITAIN-TRACING/yzdpxrndapx/index.html)

WHO'S IN CHARGE

The government would later concede the UK hadn't tested enough. Matt Hancock, the health minister, blamed a shortage of lab capacity. "We have the best scientific labs in the world, but we did not have the scale," he said in April. Germany, in contrast, "could call upon a hundred test labs, ready and waiting when the crisis struck." He did not specify how many labs the UK had.

But according to Mark Reed, general manager of Pro-Lab Diagnostics, a Canadian-owned company, that wasn't the case. "Every maker of diagnostics was saying 'We are here.' I don't think the government engaged enough; they underestimated what was required."

Reed and officials from two other diagnostic firms – Novacyt and GeneFirst Ltd – told Reuters that Public Health England evaluations of their testing kits were not completed until mid-to-late March. As a result, NHS labs were reluctant to use tests made by the three companies, they said. Public Health England told Reuters that although it carried out evaluations, it wasn't its job to approve or recommend tests. It didn't comment about these specific cases.

By contrast, laboratories in Germany began using commercially made tests from Jan. 27 and then validated new ones as they became available, said Evangelos Kotsopoulos, CEO at laboratory firm Sonic Healthcare Germany. Into February, "we simply grabbed every single instrument we could find," while hiring new lab staff and stockpiling crucial chemicals needed for testing.

Of all countries, South Korea had best demonstrated the value of mass testing early in the pandemic, making use of commercially supplied kits. One, from South Korea's Seegene Inc, was not evaluated until mid-March by Public Health England. Based on that evaluation, NHS labs began purchasing and using it in early April. German labs had been using that test since mid-February.

A spokesman for Public Health England said that, within the UK's overall strategy, the agency's role "was to provide an assured testing capability" for the virus "while commercial partners worked to develop their own capability." NHS labs were free to order and validate their own private test kits or develop their own, the agency said.

The heads of three NHS labs told Reuters otherwise: They said they had waited for Public Health England's evaluation before placing such orders.

The NHS didn't directly address a question from Reuters about the evaluation of tests by Public Health England. It said in a statement that overall policy on testing is set by the government, informed by advice from Public Health England. The statement added that "as more reagent supplies became available, NHS-run laboratories were able to increase their capacity to test for COVID-19."

The bulk of tests for the coronavirus in the early stage of the outbreak was done within Public Health England's own labs. A clinical adviser to the government said the agency had been "very centralised" and "made quite clear they are controlling all of the testing."

At the beginning, "the only game in town was the PHE test," agreed Allan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, which represents NHS laboratory staff.

The system wasn't designed for fast results.

Ravi Gupta, a Cambridge University professor of clinical microbiology, said patients at Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital had likely infected others with the coronavirus while kept on wards waiting for test results. In the early weeks, he said, they had to wait two to four days. Gupta helped develop a 90-minute test.

Members of parliament's science committee criticised Public Health England in May for initially restricting testing to a small number of labs, calling it "one of the most consequential" decisions of the crisis. Selbie responded by stating the responsibility for testing policy lay with the government's health ministry, the Department of Health. "PHE operates reference laboratories for novel and dangerous pathogens and would not be expected to operate mass testing programmes," he said.

SILENT OUTBREAK

In Birmingham, the virus arrived unnoticed.

Zia Choudhry remembers his father, Mohamed Aslam Wassan, a 67-year-old retired businessman "full of love and full of energy" coming home with a cough on March 15. Choudhry lived with his dad and his mother, together with his wife and children, in a house in Lozells, a district of Birmingham.

In the next few weeks, Wassan, remembered by some for bringing a famous snack, Bombay Mix, to the city, would die of COVID-19. So would four of his close friends, all well-known faces in the local Pakistani community. They were among at least 1,000 who would die across the city.

Until his father had taken ill, Choudhry recalled, there had been little sign that the epidemic had arrived. Up to that time, no death from COVID-19 had been recorded in this city of just over one million people. The city council had just issued a press release confirming a total of five local cases, and reminding citizens "the risk to the general public remains low."

But the infection had already been seeded. By Reuters calculations, based on later deaths, about 29,000 people were infected in Birmingham by that point.

There were grim days that followed. Eight days after his infection, Wassan was hospitalized. He was put on a ventilator the next day, and it was turned off after five more days. Choudhry could not attend his father's funeral.

Choudhry believes the advice to socially isolate by staying at home, which did not come until March 23, should have come earlier. His father had been healthy enough to live much longer, he thinks. "You know, it was not his time," he said.

Speaking at a press conference in early June, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was still too early to draw conclusions about early decisions. "All such judgments will need to be examined in the fullness of time," he said.

In interviews, seven directors of public health at large local authorities told Reuters they received little more information than the government released to the public on its website. The directors, who are employed by local authorities, not by Public Health England, said this lack of communication hampered their efforts to prevent the virus spreading.

"We were flying blind," said Lisa McNally, director of public health in Sandwell, a district neighbouring Birmingham.

McNally said the government refused to share models used by its scientific advisers and the data that fed them. They wouldn't reveal, for example, how many people from her area were calling the NHS helpline with COVID-19 symptoms. If local officials had been kept informed there could have been special efforts to work out the source of infection, or an information campaign aimed at a particular area to reinforce the lockdown.

"We basically would have done contact tracing," she said.

Louise Smith, the director of health in the rural county of Norfolk, in eastern England, was angry that mortality and case data weren't shared by local hospitals. From March to mid-April, she said, "I was finding out about the deaths by reading the local newspaper."

In Birmingham, the city's health director Justin Varney said when the first deaths occurred in early March, he used to get a personal call from Chris Whitty or his deputy. But he was given neither a name nor postcode of the victim. It was just the "barest minimum of details" and he was told "not do anything with that until the NHS announced it."

Whitty did not respond to a request for comment.

And the information blackout continued. Throughout most of the outbreak, Birmingham's Varney, like other public health directors, was given no more detail about deaths and infections than was published on national websites, with the exception of information about outbreaks in nursing homes or other institutions. A breakdown of deaths by neighbourhood, which would have identified clusters like in Lozells, was not released until May 1.

Workers in protective suits disinfect a waiting hall at the Wuhan Railway Station which has been closed due to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Wuhan, Hubei province, China March 24, 2020. cnsphoto via REUTERS/File Photo.

Secrecy was pervasive. Dr Helen Carter, Public Health England's deputy director in the Midlands, revealed in a May 15 memo to Birmingham councillors that the government had initially ordered the agency not to share with local councils its surveillance reports containing data about notified cases from local hospital emergency rooms and general practitioners.

"Until April 2020 PHE was not permitted to share the surveillance reports with local partners by the Cabinet Office," she wrote in the memo, which is reported here for the first time. After April, information was shared with public health directors, but the reports remained official secrets and were "marked as official sensitive and not in the public domain," said the memo, which was reviewed by Reuters.

Public Health England declined requests by Reuters to interview Carter or any member of its staff involved in contact tracing. A spokesman said some of its surveillance reports were classified as "official sensitive" which, the spokesman said, was standard practice for non-public information. The agency had a "constant dialogue" with local health directors, with "routine exchanges of information and data," the spokesman added.

The government also restricted the power of local authorities to inform their communities about the spread of the virus. Health director Varney, who works for the city of Birmingham, said in the beginning there had been "a complete embargo on local government doing proactive (communications) about COVID. At this stage, everything was being centrally controlled."

A spokesman for the health ministry declined to respond to questions about its relationship with local health directors or its media strategy.

In Varney's view, communication was urgently needed to prevent misunderstandings about the virus taking hold and to target communities where many elderly people have poor English. He used a regulatory loophole to get the message out: He found he was allowed to talk about issues affecting "community cohesion."

CALLING A HALT

Sophie Grenville and her husband, Mark, who manage a country estate in the county of Hampshire, took matters into their own hands.

It was early March when the couple tested positive for the coronavirus. She described her experiences later in a journal she shared with Reuters called "A Diary of a Super Spreader." Her case illustrates the complexity and the slow pace of the early UK version of contact tracing.

The couple was tested for the virus after returning from a trip to Indonesia on Feb. 23. They developed what grew into a very distinctive, dry cough – like a fox or a deer barking – and reported it to the NHS helpline. They waited three days for a test. All the while, she wrote in the diary, she and her husband were thinking of the hundreds of people they recently had come into contact with at social and business events, from "High Court judges to football chiefs."

Nurses in protective clothing visited their home on March 6 and took samples. The next day, they received the call with the positive test result, and later another call from an epidemiologist from Public Health England. Grenville said she was told the agency was only interested in people the couple had been in touch with when Grenville or her husband had recognizable symptoms.

At this point, Public Health England had been running a contact-tracing service for several weeks. When someone tested positive, they would get in touch and seek out potential contacts. In response to questions from Reuters, Public Health England said it couldn't comment on individual cases, but, "We followed the contact-tracing guidance that was in place at the time. This guidance stated that contacts should be traced from the point of notification of symptoms. This has changed as the knowledge of the virus has grown." Public Health England and the World Health Organization now recommend tracing contacts from two days before the onset of symptoms.

Even by March, Public Health England's operation was under-resourced. Teams that usually dealt with food poisoning, measles or tuberculosis outbreaks had been drafted in.

According to two senior doctors who were directly involved, the Public Health England teams were asked to cover huge regions. They didn't have the manpower to conduct serious contact tracing for measles, let alone COVID-19. Minutes of a February 18 meeting of the government's top scientific advisory committee, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), revealed that nationally Public Health England could then handle only five new cases per week. A spokesman for Public Health England told Reuters that reflected the complex international nature of early cases.

Sophie Grenville said that in her case contact tracers reached out to just two people – two sons the couple had taken out for dinner the night they had developed slight coughs. She and her husband decided to do their own contact tracing, alerting many other people they had recently encountered.

"We were more upfront than we were advised we needed to be," Grenville said.

She recounted the chaotic scene in her diary: "All of Sunday we are making calls and discovering that all sorts of people we have seen have symptoms, some worse than others, and plenty we have seen are also completely fine. Everyone in our circle is having to tell their workplaces about their exposure and they are all shutting down."

About 15 people the Grenvilles knew arranged to be tested, after reporting that they either had been in close contact with the couple or were exhibiting symptoms. Their farm manager tested positive, as well as a lady they had dropped in to see during the weekend, and two sons who had displayed no symptoms. Luckily, she said, none required hospitalization.

Meanwhile, the actual source of the outbreak remained a mystery, including to Public Health England, Sophie Grenville recalled. She and her husband originally had been able to get tested because on their return from Indonesia they had changed planes in Malaysia, which was considered an early hot spot. But their symptoms hadn't developed for more than a week. That raised the possibility that they hadn't caught coronavirus in Southeast Asia, but in Britain. Scientists believe it takes up to 14 days to develop COVID-19 symptoms, but the average is four to five days.

Indeed, on March 5, the government was told by SAGE that transmission in the community was underway. Five days later, the committee heard the UK "likely has thousands of cases – as many as 5,000 to 10,000 – which are geographically spread nationally." That confirmed what many experts had suspected. Jason Strelitz, the director of public health in the east London borough of Newham, said from the end of February he began telling colleagues "time and time again" to be under no illusion: official figures for COVID-19 were "a massive underestimate."

Based on analysis of the wave of deaths in the weeks that followed, and applying standard methods developed by research epidemiologists, Reuters calculates that Britain only detected about 3% of all COVID-19 infections so far, including those with no symptoms. This method may underestimate the rate of detection, however, when the epidemic spread into nursing homes and fatality rates were likely higher than average. Research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated the UK detected 18% of COVID-19 cases with clinical symptoms, compared to 43% in Germany.

But instead of ramping up testing and contact tracing across the country, the government brought the programme to a halt. On March 12, chief medical adviser Whitty announced from now on, "all of the testing capacity" would be pivoted to testing people in hospital with symptoms. Anyone else who fell sick with suspected COVID-19 would have to cope – and advised not even to contact the health service unless their condition grew serious. And contact tracing was over in all but special cases, such as outbreaks in prisons or immigration centres.

For some who had spent their lives fighting disease, the decision to scale back contact tracing in the community came as a shock. Among them was David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the world's leading experts on infection control and a former chairman of Public Health England. He learned how to contact trace in 1976 when tracking the spread of smallpox in the slums of Kolkata, India.

He believes "modellers" — who use data and assumptions to predict a disease's spread — carried too much weight in decisions. And they appeared to have conditioned policymakers, he felt, to believe the virus could not be stopped. "I don't think any field epidemiologist would recommend to stop contact tracing in an outbreak."

Whitty, the government's most senior medical adviser, didn't comment.

Papers published by SAGE appear to support Heymann's suspicion that modelling scientists influenced the decision to stop routine contact tracing. SAGE's modelling committee said as early as February 3 that contact tracing "is not practical once there are large numbers of cases."

A further detailed study by three modellers from the University of Cambridge , Manchester University and Public Health England, submitted to SAGE on Feb. 12, argued that beyond a certain point in the outbreak, testing would be pointless. SAGE endorsed this paper on Feb. 18, according to published minutes, concluding that contact tracing would "no longer be useful" in the case of "sustained transmission" of the virus.

Some countries took a different approach. Just as Britain was shutting down its community tracing, Germany recruited an army of locally based contact tracers. In the southern city of Heidelberg and surrounding district of 800,000 people, local health director Rainer Schwertz told Reuters how by the second week of March, he had tripled the size of his department, recruiting 200 medical students to work on intensive tracing. By early June, just 38 people had died from COVID-19.

A Public Health England spokesman said that contact tracing "was never abandoned." But once there was clear evidence of widespread, sustained community transmission of COVID-19, it was clear that contact tracing "was unlikely to control the outbreak alone and so was targeted where it could be most effective during this phase." The agency did not respond to a request for data showing what tracing continued.

Public health directors, nursing home managers and NHS staff interviewed by Reuters said they were not aware of any further tracing by Public Health England until the programme was relaunched in June.

GOING IT ALONE

Tom Lewis, a consultant microbiologist at the Barnstaple hospital in north Devon, had spare capacity in his laboratory. He and his hospital team had tried in early April to offer testing for nursing home residents in the local community "because nobody else was doing anything." But senior NHS executives ordered his team "to back off. They said, this is not your job. This is a PHE job. So we said, 'fine.'"

The NHS didn't comment about the incident.

Local teams from Public Health England had done stellar tracing work in the early days of the outbreak, said Lewis. But then the "contract tracing stopped without really any warning and PHE then went very distant. I've had almost no contact with PHE since then."

He said the agency was "massively over-stretched" and it was unclear who was in charge.

This dysfunction was felt by some on the frontline. Roxanne Jenner-Ash, the manager of a Barnstaple nursing home, described a feeling of isolation at the height of the outbreak. "There was a point when no one wanted to support us," she said. Everyone – general practitioners, nurses and paramedics – all had different guidance and "everyone had different roles and opinions." At the same time, their residents were suffering: "You've got people who can't feel heat, they can't make sense of what's going on, they can't communicate that they're in pain."

After dealing with an outbreak in which nine residents died, Jenner-Ash was only sent swab kits to test her residents on May 9, when the infection had stopped spreading at the nursing home, at least for the time being.

But for Lewis the key thing was the absence of contact tracing – a real attempt to follow the spread of the virus, for example by interviewing and testing care workers who had been in contact with a COVID-positive patient, even if they had no symptoms.

Starting in early May, Lewis and his NHS colleagues decided to launch their own wider tracing scheme. They followed contacts who tested positive at the Barnstaple hospital with the help of a sexual health adviser employed by the trust, Joanne Hamilton. Hamilton's work on sexually transmitted diseases had made her an experienced contact tracer.

When another resident of her Pilton House nursing home tested positive in late May, this time, said Jenner-Ash, "I was no longer alone." Within a day of the test result, Lewis and Hamilton had arranged for the entire staff of Pilton House to be tested – an exercise that uncovered a staff member who was positive and could then isolate, possibly saving the lives of others. Since then, Pilton House has remained COVID free.

Reuters learned there were small, similar experiments repeated across the country, in the highlands of Scotland, in the Lake District, in Wales, and in Sheffield, in northern England.

Bing Jones, a retired doctor who specialised in haematology, was one of a group of six retired medics who set up the Sheffield project. He said the national decision to stop contact tracing was a "catastrophic decision" that has allowed the virus to travel largely unchecked across the United Kingdom and resulted in unnecessary deaths.

"It is complete ineptitude. It was such a basic mistake. It is one of the basic planks of managing an epidemic," he said. "There was no reason why you couldn't have kept it going on a small scale or doing whatever you could."

Working with local general practitioners from mid-April, the group found 13 people with coronavirus symptoms, who generated 58 contacts.

They concluded that health and care workers may have been unwittingly passing on the virus. Judy Stewart, one of the volunteers on the Sheffield programme, said she contacted five nurses, including some who worked at a nearby hospital, to advise them to self-isolate after they were named as being in close contact with someone who had recently tested positive for COVID-19. Stewart said the nurses told her they discussed the request with their managers, but they were advised to ignore the request and keep working.

"The resistance shocked me because of where it came from," she said. "I got lots of texts back saying: 'sorry I can't be involved, but good luck and it was nice talking to you.'"

Behind that resistance, some involved feared, was a concern among senior health service managers that too much testing and too much tracing of the contacts of healthcare workers would have – at a time of acute crisis – resulted in too many key staff taking time off work to isolate for at least the seven days mandated by the government.

Chris Morley, the chief nurse overseeing Sheffield's main hospitals, responded that the volunteer scheme was "not part of the Public Health England official Test and Trace System and our staff would therefore not necessarily have been aware of what it was or the legitimacy of the person asking them to self-isolate."

In London, the Francis Crick Institute, which runs a lab that has provided COVID-19 tests for hospitals, offered on April 15 to launch a programme to search for health workers who might be infected, even while showing no symptoms. University College London Hospitals conducted a month-long study of 200 healthcare workers from the end of March; 42 tested positive with the virus, but only eight had symptoms that met the official case definition. By the time of its offer, Crick had spare capacity to run at least 1,000 more tests a day.

But despite Crick's intensive lobbying to government ministers, NHS leaders and Selbie, the Public Health England chief, the testing programme was blocked, two sources with direct knowledge told Reuters.

Public Health England and the NHS referred questions about Crick's offer to the health ministry, the Department of Health, which told Reuters: "There was no guidance or instruction to NHS trusts to limit their testing programmes to hospital admissions." Increased capacity meant testing could now be extended to asymptomatic staff, a spokesperson said.

Over the past two months, Britain finally ramped up community testing for the coronavirus and launched in late May what the prime minister called a "world-beating" contact-tracing system staffed by thousands. But the new British smartphone app - heralded as a lynchpin of the contract-tracing system that was supposed to roll out last month - has been delayed. The government conceded the NHS COVID-19 App may not be ready until autumn at the earliest.

(reporting by Stephen Grey, Andrew MacAskill, Ryan McNeill, Steve Stecklow and Tommy Wilkes; additional reporting by Thomas Escritt and Paul Carrel in Berlin and Elizabeth Piper in London; edited by Janet McBride)

[© 2020 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.]

Copyright 2020 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.