The impact of NHS Test and Trace is still unclear – despite the UK government setting aside £37bn for it over two years, MPs are warning.
The Public Accounts Committee said it was set up on the basis it would help prevent future lockdowns – but since its creation there had been two more.
It said the spending was “unimaginable” and warned the taxpayer could not be treated like an “ATM machine”.
But Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the MPs’ report “defies logic”.
Baroness Dido Harding, head of the National Institute for Health Protection, which runs the system, pointed out it had been built from scratch and was now doing more tests than any other comparable country.
She said performance had been improving with more people who tested positive being reached and more of their close contacts being asked to isolate.
“It is making a real impact in breaking the chains of transmission,” she added.
But the MPs’ report questioned:
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Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
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