Why is the government's messaging on testing all over the place? [THREAD]

1 - The best way to limit human and economic costs of coronavirus is test-and-trace. The reason this wasn't adopted in UK was capacity constraints, but unwilling to admit this, the government made up bull about test-and-trace being unnecessary in a developed country.

2 - With test-and-trace impossible due to capacity, the government moved to "delay" phase. This means social distancing + increasing ICU capacity. Therefore testing only needed for healthcare workers and in-patients.

3 - However, there was a problem - COVID-19 spread faster than government predicted and cases more severe. Thus testing capacity overwhelmed even with plan to only test healthcare workers and in-patients. As of yesterday 2,000 of 500,000 frontline NHS workers have been tested.

4 - To distract from this problem - i.e. govt policy failing on its own terms - the government responded to questions about lack of testing, including for NHS workers, with answers about why Britain doesn't need test-and-trace. e.g. (h/t @alexwickham)

5 - This fell down on 2 levels. First, it's irrelevant to our failure to test NHS staff. Second, by this point the government's overriding strategy has come into question. It turns out people want test-and-trace!

6 - Because it is loathe to admit its strategy is failing on its own terms (e.g. we're not even testing enough NHS workers and in patients) and that the overall strategy unpopular (people want test-and-trace). The government have resorted to these vague, aspirational answers.

7 - What's vague about that answer? It doesn't make clear whether the aspiration is to produce enough tests to keep NHS capacity up (by testing staff and inpatients) or to actually suppress disease through test-and-trace (by testing huge proportion of population).

8 - So what's their plan? It's clear government don't intend to ever test-and-trace. The capacity is not there. They do want to test NHS staff and in-patients. Their failure to do this up to now is an enormous fuck-up. They're scrambling to increase capacity to this minimum level

9 - However, they won't admit they've abandoned test-and-trace. Why? Because that implies they've given up on the main way of ending lockdown (as was achieved in S Korea). They need lengthy lockdown to be seen as act of god, not result of political failures or choice.

10 - All this means we can expect weeks more evasion from government, and media need to try to force government to come clean. That means pointed questions about test-and-trace, and whether we have abandoned it.

11 - It also means refusing to let government evade questions about testing of NHS patients/staff, with bromides about philosophical differences between strategies. The relative strengths of different strategies irrelevant - the government is failing on own terms!

12 - We can summarise by saying that government will not admit 2 things: 1) In rejecting test-and trace they have chosen suboptimal strategy due to capacity constraints. 2) Even on our suboptimal path, government are failing on their own terms.

END - The job of the press should be to force those admissions. Only once we've got those out of the way can the government be straight with the public.

Over to you @bbclaurak @Peston @BethRigby