The national tracing service is only getting in touch with about 61 per cent of contactsPeople who fail to respond to phone calls from the NHS Test and Trace unit face being visited on their doorstep by council workers as thousands of call handlers are about to lose their jobs. A third of the call centre staff are to be laid off and the rest deployed regionally to work with councils, in an acknowledgement that the system has not been fighting local outbreaks effectively. Councils have been promised they will be given the details of contacts who do not answer the phone after several local authorities said that their teams did much better by knocking on doors. After weeks in which local directors of public health have pleaded with the centralised contact-tracing system in England to let them help in

Source: The Times August 10, 2020 16:11 UTC