“Leaked emails seen by Sky News show how the government and Public Health England rejected offers of additional testing from other laboratories in favour of a strategy it described as ‘command and control’”.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-national-coronavirus-testing-centre-only-conducting-1500-tests-a-day-11971991

I’ve been critiquing PHE for their excessive “command and control” of testing.

This was literally the strategy.

What a total disaster, while PHE struggles to set up a central testing facility they continue to ignore offers from ready-to-go smaller labs.

It’s really difficult to create functional labs from scratch — they could have asked labs to do the testing straight away rather than requisitioning select equipment for labs they’re struggling to start up.

Turns out “command and control” got in the way.

In any case, the Govt could continue trying to build its own labs while approving new big and existing smaller labs to do testing.

They’re not contradictory strategies, they can be complimentary to reduce potential risks of ‘command and control’ not work.