Test and Trace bosses ‘set out plans to rebuild public trust’
Test and Trace bosses have set out plans to “rebuild public trust” among local councils, according to reports, as the contact tracing app this week failed to identify 123,000 positive cases of coronavirus.
According to leaked slides seen by Sky News, government officials heading up England’s contact tracing scheme believe they need to “reset” their relationships with local councils.
It comes after official figures released today showed that just 60.5 per cent of people who came into contact with the virus in the week to 11 November were reached by the NHS Track and Trace app.
The figure meant the government app failed to reach 123,000 positive coronavirus cases, and came close to the record low of 59.6 per cent seen at the end of last month.
The poor performance has forced the bulk of London boroughs to pick up the slack by deploying council leaders to call local residents who may have come into contact with the virus.
Analysis by Morning Wire has revealed that almost two-thirds of London boroughs have departed from the national contact tracing scheme.
Redbridge and Hammersmith and Fulham today joined a list of 21 out of 32 London boroughs that have snubbed the national system in favour of localised approaches to tackling the virus.
It comes as the government faces mounting pressure to sack Track and Trace chief Baroness Dido Harding, after the programme failed to deter a second wave of infections across the country.
Harding faced a grilling in the Commons last week by MPs, who claimed her contact tracing scheme was repeatedly failing to meet targets.
Health and social care committee chair Jeremy Hunt pressured Harding to explain why only “three per cent of the total theoretical maximum” of people infected with coronavirus were self-isolating.
“So what that means is instead of the theoretical maximum of 177,000 quarantining, actually it’s less than 5,000”, he added.
“We should be asking 177,000 people every day to quarantine. But in practice… you only find out about just over a third of them. [Then] you only reach 60 per cent of their contacts and only 20 per cent of those actually isolate,” Hunt told the committee.
Harding stressed that the contact tracing programme, which has cost the Treasury upwards of £12bn so far this year, was largely dependent on having a fully operational testing system, adding that Hunt was being “slightly pessimistic”.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: “NHS Test and Trace is breaking chains of transmission thanks to local and national teams working hand in glove — over 2m people who may otherwise have unknowingly spread coronavirus have been contacted and told to isolate.
“We are continuously seeking to improve the service, as well as our vital local relationships. There are now over 150 local contact tracing partnerships across the country with more to come, and we are going further by sending out hundreds of thousands of rapid lateral flow tests to local authorities across England.”