Ministers must speed up testing or risk contact tracing falling ‘dead in the water’, warn doctors 

Ministers must massively speed up coronavirus testing or risk their much-vaunted contact tracing plan falling ‘dead in the water’, doctors warned last night.

Currently almost half of test results are failing to come back within 48 hours, leaving the new army of 25,000 tracers racing to get in touch with contacts of newly confirmed cases in time.

Delays can mean chains of infection could quickly spread – thwarting plans to ease lockdown restrictions.

On Friday, the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) said tracers should aim to have contacts of confirmed cases isolating within 48 to 72 hours of a test taking place. 

Any delay beyond that would have a ‘significant impact’ on the ability to stem the virus, they said.

But experts last night said long delays for test results were still the norm, meaning efforts to trace contacts would come far too late as these individuals could already have passed the virus on to others by then.

NHS consultant microbiologist Tom Lewis, from Devon, said: ‘With contact tracing, you need test results back within 48 hours at the very latest – ideally within 24 hours. If you’re too slow, you’ve missed the boat.

‘But on Friday I spoke to a care home which said it took six days for them to get swabs sent out after they asked for them, and another three days to get results back.’

Dr Bing Jones, a retired GP who helped set up a pilot contact tracing scheme with volunteer colleagues in Sheffield, said: ‘There’s been no independent audit of how long it takes to get test results back, but anecdotal evidence suggests it’s incredibly patchy.

‘There will be many places where people rely on a postal test, who won’t get their result for up to a week, by which time the whole contact tracing thing is dead in the water.

‘You’ve got to get to people who have the virus quickly.’

The Mail on Sunday asked the Department of Health and Social Care for a breakdown of how long it was taking for test results to come back, but it failed to answer.

We asked what proportion of tests were by post – which is slower and less accurate – and again it failed to answer.

We also asked how many confirmed cases and their close contacts tracers had managed to call so far, and how many people had agreed to self-isolate, but it failed to answer.

A spokeswoman said 2,095 people tested positive on Friday, and that the tracing service was ‘working hard to trace their close contacts’.