The UK is "playing catchup" to get the testing coverage it needs for SARS-CoV-2, writes the University of East Anglia's Paul Hunter in an opinion piece at the Guardian.
The UK initially first resisted closing schools and businesses to contain the COVID-19 outbreak and instead asked symptomatic individuals to stay home and cautioned at-risk individuals against travel, as the New York Times reported last month. The aim, it noted, was to bolster herd immunity. But later in March, the UK government shifted gears and shut nonessential businesses and told everyone to stay home.
This approach, Hunter writes at the Guardian, has left the UK unprepared. Not only does he say the UK doesn't have enough tests, he adds that it has limited laboratory capacity as labs that were part of a public health laboratory service have closed, been taken over by hospitals, or merged into regional labs.
"The government had made no preparations to increase the supply of testing kits or expand laboratory capacity — and the UK found itself at the back of the line in a global queue for tests," he writes.