The creation of NHS Nightingale, assembling a 4,000-bed emergency hospital in just two weeks, is an important milestone. Yet testing, isolation and quarantine – basic public health interventions – were barely on the ministerial agenda. On insufficient testing, an internal government briefing note contains the mystifying defence that the World Health Organization’s instruction to “test, test, test” was aimed at another audience. This figure looked like the worst kind of spin when Downing Street admitted on Wednesday that only 2,000 people out of 500,000 frontline NHS workers had been tested for coronavirus. Unduly optimistic claims about PPE and testing appear to be driven by the view that audiences need good news.

Source: The Guardian April 01, 2020 18:46 UTC