By Tony O’Riley-
The technical glitch that saw nearly 16,000 Covid-19 cases go unreported in England is not a significant development because it has been corrected, and has no substantial effect on saving lives.
Labour’s shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the missing results were “putting lives at risk”. Mr. Ashworth said the unreported cases meant as many as 48,000 contacts had not been traced and not been isolating, with “thousands blissfully unaware they’ve been exposed to Covid, potentially spreading this deadly virus”
PHE said the issue has been fixed, and that outstanding cases had been passed on to tracers by the early hours of Saturday morning.
Health Secretary, Mr Hancock told MPs, that extra contact tracers were being used and that 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch have been contacted a second time to trace their contacts. mr. Hancock added that a technical issue as results were processed “should never have happened” and is being investigated.
Public Health England said 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures.
Mr Hancock told MPs that extra contact tracers were being used and that 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch have been contacted a second time to trace their contacts.
However, research in June 2020, revealed that up to 80 per cent of people who test positive for coronavirus don’t show any symptoms.COVID-19. Only 15% were severe infections requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation.
At the time, Mr Hancock acknowledged that asymptomatic transmission is “one of the things that makes controlling this disease really hard.
Contact Tracing
The contact tracing system which aims to track and trace all those who have been in contact with an infected patient is not likely to successfully trace close to everyone they have been in contact with. So, there is no evidence of how successful the process is.
Even in the event of tracking down most contacts of those who test positive, the government is really looking at saving the lives of those with serious underlying issues through the process of self isolation, but there is no evidence how successful this process is.
It will also be necessary to contact everyone those found have in turn been in contact to effectively track down all those who may have been infected in the process, and chances are that many people will not know all of the people they have contacted, or will not reveal them all.
Research Analysis
Analysis published by the Lancet Journal last June revealed that a high proportion of cases would need to self-isolate, and a high proportion of their contacts will need to be successfully traced to ensure an effective reproduction number lower than 1 in the absence of other measures.
Combined with moderate physical distancing measures, self-isolation and contact tracing would be more likely to achieve control of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 transmission.
The document states that ‘isolation of symptomatic cases and contact tracing alone are unlikely to contain an outbreak unless a high proportion of cases are isolated and contacts successfully traced and quarantined’. It later states that ‘Several characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 make effective isolation and contact tracing challenging, including high transmissibility, a relatively short serial interval, and transmission that can occur without symptoms’.
Researchers said that the effectiveness of manual contact-tracing strategies was highly dependent on how many contacts were successfully traced, with a high level of tracing required to ensure ‘R'(the infection rate) is lower than 1 in our baseline scenario.
Researchers also said that when app-based tracing was in place, we estimated that if work contacts alone were restricted, a substantial proportion of the adult population would need to have zero work contacts to ensure R is lower than 1. They concluded by stating that their results highlight the challenges involved in controlling SARS-CoV-2.
All said, although mass testing and contract tracing has its benefits and may have a reasonable success rate of reducing the spread of Covid-19 infections, its weakness and drawbacks are enough to largely question the issue made about the recent glitch is all political, and does not have any provable effect on saving lives.