UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to ramp up the country’s coronavirus testing efforts after facing a barrage of criticism for screening fewer people than other nations at a similar stage of the epidemic.
The number of deaths linked to confirmed cases of the coronavirus reached a new UK high on Wednesday, the latest figures available, with 569 deaths recorded in a day, taking the total to 2,921.
Those deaths came as the British Medical Association (BMA) released new ethics guidelines for doctors that mean older patients with a low chance of survival could have life-saving ventilators removed so the machines can be given to healthier patients.
Newspaper headlines on Thursday blasted the government’s failure to test more, even in typically-loyal British media outlets. “Why mass testing must be our No 1 priority — and why we lag behind the rest of the world,” said the Telegraph’s online edition.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister told reporters Thursday that a total of 10,412 tests were carried out across the country on Tuesday.
A total of 2,800 National Health Service (NHS) workers have now been tested at drive-in testing facilities, Downing Street said.
“We acknowledge that more needs to be done in relation to testing. We need to be testing more people and we need to be making progress very quickly,” the spokesman said.
Many health workers are self-isolating after showing possible symptoms of the coronavirus but could return to work sooner if testing showed they were not infected.
The latest figures come eight days after Johnson asserted that the UK was “massively ramping up” its nationwide testing program, and would continue to increase the number of tests carried out each week. The Prime Minister, who is himself in self-isolation after testing positive for the virus, posted a video to Twitter on Wednesday evening in which he lamented a “sad, sad day” in reference to the previous day’s death toll of 563.
He stressed his efforts to increase the country’s testing capacity, as well as listing the measures already put in place to deal with the pandemic and urging people to respect the restrictions currently in place.
“I want to say a special word about testing, because it is so important, and as I have said for weeks and weeks, this is the way through,” Johnson said. “This is how we will unlock the coronavirus puzzle. This is how we will defeat it in the end.”
Credit: CNN
The post UK slammed for coronavirus testing shortfall as officials release guidance on who to save first appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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