THIS Story by ⁦ @ShaunLintern⁩ is going to make you mad

Rather than rapidly expand and support NHS labs with existing equipment, QA, information systems linked to GPs & PH they outsourced to companies with labs THAT HAD TO SET UP LABS FROM SCRATCH https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-lighthouse-lab-milton-keynes-samples-alderley-park-glasgow-a9589401.html

It gets worse.

They relied on volunteers! Students, not realising there were supporting commercial companies, volunteering as they expected to learn RT-PCR testing set to opening thousands and thousands of test bags, day after day.

No wonder they felt exploited.

All the tests failed at the beginning as they set up labs using donated equipment.

As I suspected there were NO common protocols, systems or QA between the various labs and OF COURSE they were not networked into NHS software systems.

Of COURSE it was a shambles.

Swab and sample security issues were rife, something experienced lab staff would have ironed out right at the beginning with Standard Operaring Procedure, training and common QA.

This reeks of decision making on the hoof driven by ideology not experience and understanding. And did they even use experienced NHS /public health and Pathology Lab personnel to set it up?

No. They used a firm of accountants.

DeLoittes

The void rate was high.

It has been suggested 40% in the Alderney Park Lab. 20% across the board with a whole series of issues, from packaging, swabs not being placed in tubes, leakages, poor labelling so bar codes could not be scanned.

Dept of Health deny it but provide no better data.

Volunteers working around the clock. Terribly upset at the images coming out of care homes. Especially when the signals coming from the tests were so strong indicating the infections were severe.

How utterly demoralising when you had been running furiously to set up labs, troubleshoot a series of problems, managed to get out 65k-70k a day tests only to hear Johnson and Hancock announce posted kits as tests.

It felt like cheating because it WAS cheating

Gradually, as volunteers returned to their normal lives it began to dawn on the volunteers that private companies were behind these labs.

And now we’re recruiting to paid rôles.

On several occasions, due to lack of experienced personnel, there was a real danger of losing thousands of tests.

It looks to me as if they DID lose thousands of tests.
One Company, set up and supported a lot of taxpayer funded grants was the Milton Keynes Lab, 12 staff.

The other, in Cheshire, Medicines Discovery Catapult Ltd, funded largely by Innovate UK , a Gov Funded Agency.

A third in Glasgow

NONE WERE ACCREDITED.

NONE EXPERIENCED IN LARGE SCALE PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTING.

This is absolutely ludicrous. Madness.

It is clear to almost everyone that the target setting and indeed the whole commissioning have been politically driven not scientifically and strategically driven.

If Cummings’ finger is anywhere near this his head should roll. And anyone else who decided this was remotely OK.

@ShaunLintern has done a really superb job on this.

I knew something was going wrong in April (many will remember me flagging up the rapidly growing gap between tests & people tested from the last week of April )

This from public health perspective.

https://twitter.com/fascinatorfun/status/1277374015896682499?s=20 https://twitter.com/fascinatorfun/status/1277374015896682499

And this too. It was foreseeable. Much of it was forseen and the Government warned.

Solutions were never going to be easy when the whole world was facing a crisis but could have been delivered far more safely. https://twitter.com/fascinatorfun/status/1277543321334931459?s=21

Make no mistake about it. Tens of thousands of people have died avoidably.

This is fairly and squarely down to successive Governments cutting public health and NHS diagnostic lab infrastructure then being driven by ideology not good sense or by decent values.