Almost 60,000 Covid-infected people didn’t tell NHS Test and Trace who they came into contact with last week, according to official figures which suggest England may be starting to rebel against the ‘pingdemic’ chaos.
The controversial contact tracing system made 250,000 calls in the seven-day spell ending July 21, making it the busiest week since the darkest period of the second wave in January.
But nearly a quarter of infected people who were contacted didn’t cooperate, in a signal that people may now be trying to protect family, friends and colleagues from having to self-isolate.
The rate of Covid-infected people who’ve avoided naming close contacts has risen consistently since the third wave started to gather steam in June, from 14.1 per cent to 23.1 per cent.
Government data yesterday underlined just how bad the ‘pingdemic’ has become, with a record 1.5million quarantine instructions sent out in the same week.
Millions of workers have been unable to do their jobs because they’ve been told to isolate, leaving supermarket shelves empty, pubs and restaurants shut, and trains cancelled across the country.
Boris Johnson is under mounting pressure to end the chaos by bringing forward the date for exempting fully vaccinated people from self-isolation rules.
The rate of Covid-infected people avoiding naming close contacts has risen consistently since the third wave started to gather steam in June, from 14.1 per cent to 23.1 per cent in the most recent week. Blue bars show the number of people contacted by Test and Trace who didn’t name any close contacts, while the red line shows how the proportion of people not giving away any details has risen over time
A record 1.5million people were asked to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace last week, official data shows as England’s ‘pingdemic’ chaos continues to rage on
Keir Starmer demands self-isolation for double-jabbed ends on August 7 more than a WEEK before government’s plan as Scotland and Wales lead the way
Boris Johnson s under mounting pressure today to end the ‘Pingdemic’ by bringing forward the date for exempting fully vaccinated people from self-isolation rules.
Keir Starmer has joined calls to bring the August 16 timetable forward to August 7 – pointing out that is what Wales has chosen to do.
Scotland is also due to remove the requirement for the double-jabbed who come into contact with positive cases from August 9 – but the PM has refused to budge despite stricken businesses warning of food shortages.
In a round of interviews this morning, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps reiterated that there is no intention of changing the date, although he admitted: ‘We are being, if you like, slightly cautious about it.’
However, Sir Keir said in a statement: ‘This has been a summer of chaos for British businesses and British families.’
‘The Tory government has never been able to explain the logic of their self-isolation rules and has just repeated the same mistakes over and over again.
‘While the British public have been trying to do the right thing, we saw this Government’s instincts when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak tried to avoid the isolation millions have had to endure.
‘The Government’s slapdash approach to this global pandemic is crippling our economy and creating real problems for businesses and families alike. Welsh Labour has shown what can be done and it’s time for the Tories to do the same.’
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Labour leader Keir Starmer has joined calls to bring the August 16 timetable forward to August 7 – pointing out that is what Wales has chosen to do.
Scotland is also due to remove the requirement for the double-jabbed who come into contact with positive cases from August 9 – but the PM has refused to budge despite stricken businesses warning of food shortages.
The £37billion Test and Trace programme — set-up last May — has been branded a monumental waste of money by politicians for failing in its only goal to stop another lockdown.
Since it was set up 14 months ago, England has faced two more national lockdowns and two Covid waves.
Even SAGE has criticised the programme as having a ‘marginal impact’ on the spread of the virus, and the former head of the Treasury called it the ‘most wasteful public spending of all time’.
The system is supposed to find and tell Covid-positive people and their close contacts to self-isolate in order to break chains of transmission.
When someone tests positive for Covid they receive their results via text, email or a phone call and are told to self-isolate.
They are sent one text to tell them they have tested positive, and then at least two follow-up messages to ask them to register with the service. Those who are called will have voicemails left on their answer machine.
They are then contacted by Test and Trace to ensure they are staying at home, and asked for details of any close contacts — people they came into contact with for at least 15 minutes — who may also have the virus.
If NHS Test and Trace contact tracers are unable to reach infected people, their details are passed on to local authorities to follow-up.
Of the 251,190 people asked to provide close contacts in the most recent week, just 193,000 provided the names and numbers of those who they may have passed the virus onto.
More than 58,000 refused to do so.
It marks the largest number of people who refused to cooperate with Test and Trace since January and the highest rate since March – at 23.1 per cent.
It is an increase from the 21.2 per cent (40,602 people) who didn’t provide any details in the week ending July 14.
Separate Test and Trace figures show that infected Brits named 596,643 people as close contacts, with 426,187 of them being household contacts and 170,456 non-household contacts.
Data shows this is the lowest proportion of close contacts outside the household identified to Test and Trace since March – when the country was in lockdown and ‘stay at home’ orders were still in place.
The contact tracing system is also struggling to reach as many people, with 14.8 per cent of infected Brits not answering their calls.
This is the highest proportion since last October, when Test and Trace was unable to reach 14.5 per cent of people who tested positive.
In total, when children sent home to isolate from school are included, there were more than 2.5million people told to quarantine last week — or four per cent of the entire population. However, some people pinged by the app would have also been contacted by Test and Trace. And some of the people who tested positive may have also been pinged or told to self-isolate
Graph shows: The number of people told to isolate by NHS Covid app (blue), contacts of someone testing positive reached by Test and Trace call handlers (orange) and people isolating because they tested positive (green) each month
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