The Health Secretary Matt Hancock has told a committee of MP’s that testing problems will take weeks to solve just as cases are rising in the country
Giving evidence to the House of Commons Health Committee Hancock said that:
“It’s a matter of a couple of weeks until we can get all of that sorted in the short term, in the immediate term,”
Asked about the apology this morning from Sarah-Jane Marsh, director of testing at NHS Test and Trace, to people who have been waiting, Hancock said it would take a fortnight to get these problems sorted.
He also said that he was ensuring that people would not be asked to go more than 75 miles for test, although he acknowledged that that was not ideal.
And he added that he was rolling out testing for asymptomatic people in care homes.
Earlier Sarah-Jane Marsh, one of the experts on the Government’s coronavirus test and trace team, has apologised to people struggling to get a test as the system struggles to cope with demand.
In a tweet, she said: “Can I please offer my heartfelt apologies to anyone who cannot get a Covid test at present.
“All of our testing sites have capacity, which is why they don’t look overcrowded, its our laboratory processing that is the critical pinch-point.We are doing all we can to expand quickly
During questioning Hancock also said that the first “credible” cases of coronavirus reinfection were starting to be seen.
He told the Health Select Committee
“We have also just started to see the first credible cases of reinfection and through genomic analysis you can see it is a different disease to the one the person got the first time around.
“But in all the cases that I have seen it has been an asymptomatic second infection that has been picked up through asymptomatic testing.
“But the hard question is, because one of the most difficult parts of dealing with this virus is asymptomatic transmission what we don’t yet know is the transmissability of the disease even from an asymptomatic person who might have had the disease before.
