The government failed to increase lab capacity AT ALL over the summer, despite their own policies leading to increased demand for tests that reduced the headroom available to deal with any second wave.
Now that cases are surging the system is collapsing.
This was all avoidable.
So what went wrong?
Pillar 2 capacity hit 135,000 tests a day on June 14.
But demand started rising from the start of July.
And capacity didn't go up again until August 27.
By then labs had been running near 100% capacity for a week, leading to widespread delays and backlogs.
This first became apparent in the Test & Trace reports, which showed longer and longer delays in delivering results for home and satellite site (mostly care home) tests, and over 10,000 tests a week never delivering a result at all!
After lengthy delays in rolling out regular testing of care homes, this now seems to account for about 250,000 tests a week in England.
A quarter of all available capacity in pillar 2 labs.
Even as labs hit 100% capacity in mid-August, they also announced a big increase in the ONS Infection Survey, from 28,000 to 150,000 tests a fortnight.
Some or all of these are processed in pillar 2 labs.
At the same time, cases were starting to rise in July and local lockdowns were being introduced across large parts of the Midlands and Northern England. High risk areas on the watchlist were promised more testing.
Again, no new lab capacity was added to support this.
All of which meant there was no spare capacity left in the system to process more tests when cases recently surged nationwide.
We squandered the summer, failing to raise capacity even as labs started to struggle, leaving us unable to handle the increased demand for testing now.
On top of this, the long planned return to school seems to have predictably caused a rise in demand for testing. As children get sick, parents and schools need them to be tested to know if they have coronavirus or just a cold.
Again, why was no new capacity prepared for this?
The return to university of students in their late teens and early twenties (age groups with some of the highest infection rates at the moment), seems likely to cause another spike in demand for testing.
Again, this has been planned for months. Why aren't we ready for it?
The end result is that testing is being rationed to avoid overloading labs, many people with symptoms are going untested, and once again NHS workers are having to self-isolate because they can't get a test to see if it's safe for them to return to work.
Lab capacity finally went up slightly this month, but last weekend's Times story suggests most if not all of this is due to tests being sent to private labs (mostly overseas).
Our capacity hasn't improved.
We paid labs in Europe to make up the shortfall.
By September 9th Pillar 2 lab capacity had risen by 26,000.
But the leaked performance report in the Times lists -
3,000 at SBS (Source BioScience in Nottingham?)
10,000 at Eurofina (in Germany)
10,000 at Immensa (in Italy)
23,000 total. Almost all of the new lab capacity.
This bought in lab capacity doesn't seem to be available every day, with total capacity varying between 138,000 and 161,000 last week.
Meanwhile thousands of swabs sent to Eurofina may have ended up in the bin because they were transported across Europe at the wrong temperature!
The last we heard about real capacity increases was that a new Lighthouse Lab will come online "this month", scaling up to process 50,000 tests a day .. by the end of the year.
Meanwhile the govt is promising 500,000 a day capacity by the end of October.
Until then, with labs overstretched and a large backlog to clear (185,000 tests as of last week), it looks like test availability will continue to be limited.
And with care homes and NHS staff understandably prioritised, it will be harder than ever for anyone else to get a test.
Meanwhile the Guardian reports that NHS (pillar 1) labs received an urgent call for help to deal with the surge in demand for pillar 2 tests on August 24.
Two days after the data shows pillar 2 labs hit 100% capacity.
Last week Andrew Bridgen claimed Ukraine might be working on a dirty bomb to use in a "false flag" attack in Europe. Unsurprisingly his comments have now been amplified by the Russian military and state media, and echoed back by Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK. 🧵
Andrew Bridgen had an "incredibly productive" meeting with the Russian ambassador in London earlier this year.
Since then he's claimed Rishi Sunak called the election to avoid being a wartime PM, and that Ukraine's planning a "false flag" nuclear attack in Europe "like 9/11". 😳
Meanwhile Russian assets and useful idiots here in the UK have been amplifying these claims of false flag attacks and dirty bombs.
John and Irina Mappin at least are known to have visited the Russian embassy recently, and all frequently share Russian propaganda on social media.
Reform's manifesto (or "contract") panders to conspiracy theorists, falsely linking covid vaccines to excess deaths and pledging to "reject" the WEF, WHO and digital currencies.
Unsurprising, given many of their supporters and candidates have rather odd views on these topics. 🧵
Nigel Farage and his Reform Party recently got an endorsement from Laurence Fox of the similarly named Reclaim Party.
Farage even recorded a video with Fox, who has repeatedly compared the Pride flag to the Swastika and promoted Islamophobia.
With friends like these...
Laurence Fox's fiancée also took selfies with Farage while out supporting him in Clacton.
She's recently claimed (amongst many other things) that the pandemic didn't happen and that "they" manipulate the weather to rob us of vital Vitamin D. Right before a heat wave started. 🤦♂️
Reform's candidate in Edinburgh South West, Ian Harper, was a vocal backer of ivermectin, and the grifters and frauds who promoted it as a cure for covid. In his bio for Reform, he talks about a "globalist agenda" seeking to "collapse society".
Not the worst thing he's said. 🧵
Ian Harper's first Twitter account was suspended, and he's now locked his second (presumably to stop voters seeing it). Luckily the internet (and its archives) remembers.
Most of his pandemic posts seem to consist of vastly exaggerated claims about the wonders of ivermectin. 🙄
Unsurprisingly Reform's Ian Harper was an enthusiastic supporter of Tess Lawrie, founder of a British group called BIRD which promoted the dewormer ivermectin as a miracle "cure" for covid, much of it based on flawed or outright fraudulent studies.
Reform's candidate in Twickenham is a member of anti-vax misinformation group HART. In leaked chat logs, Alex Starling called vaccinating children "a perverted abomination", and talked about sneaking HART content and campaigns into articles he wrote for UK news site Reaction. 🧵
If you've not come across them before, HART identify as "a group of highly qualified doctors, scientists and other experts" who just "question the narrative". But many of their members believe covid vaccines were designed to depopulate the Earth! 😳
Alex Starling fit right in at HART, calling wearing masks at school "depraved cruelty" and vaccinating children against covid "a perverted abomination". He also repeatedly suggested covid vaccines work in the same way lions "work" on a herd of zebras, "by taking out the weakest".
John Mappin appeared on Russian TV at the weekend, claiming the British public doesn't support Ukraine. Because he spoke to a few friends, and they all love Russia too. 🤷♂️
Mappin often retweets Putin's propaganda, and last year claimed he could instantly end the Ukraine war. 🤔
Russian asset / useful idiot John Mappin has also been out campaigning for Nigel Farage in Clacton-on-Sea. Haven't they suffered enough already?
Mappin previously backed Andrew Bridgen, after the MP compared covid vaccines to the Holocaust. Just the man you want on your side. 🤦♂️
John Mappin rather optimistically claimed afterwards that Nigel Farage is going to be Prime Minister, hailing him for "one of the most brilliant and sanest speeches in this island's history". 🤪
But then he's already fallen for Scientology, QAnon, and covid conspiracy theories.
The BMJ has had to issue a statement after everyone from The Telegraph and former Brexit Minister David Davis to anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists claimed that covid vaccines may be responsible for excess deaths, based on a dubious study published in @BMJPublicHealth. 🧵
The Telegraph's @sarahknapton has a history of this. Two years ago she tried to blame excess deaths (including some covid deaths!) on lockdowns, with a clickbait headline that the article (behind a paywall) failed to support. This is more of the same.
As for the BMJ article that inspired all of this, it simply takes excess death data from 47 "western" countries (ranging from the US and UK to Australia and New Zealand to Bulgaria and Moldova), adds them all up, then engages in a lot of vague arm waving.