Coronavirus: Only 4 in 10 Covid-19 patients contacted at start of government's 'test and trace' scheme, leaked figures show
Only four in 10 coronavirus patients identified in the government’s new test-and-trace programme - and little more than one-third of the contacts they named - were contacted within the first four days of the scheme's operation, leaked figures obtained by Channel 4 News suggest.
The test-and-trace system is a key element of the government’s plan to take Britain out of lockdown without sparking a new spike in infections, and Boris Johnson has promised that it will be “world-beating”.
Despite describing the first few days of the scheme as “successful", health secretary Matt Hancock has so far declined to provide figures on the number of people contacted.
And there have been reports that some of the 25,000 tracers recruited have complained of being inadequately trained or having little to do.
Now, unverified figures obtained by Channel 4 News suggest that some 4,456 confirmed Covid-19 cases were reported to the test-and-trace teams across England between the start of operations on Thursday and Sunday.
Of these, just 1,831 had completed the required forms to provide information about their contacts either online or through a phone call by the end of the weekend.
This amounts to 41 per cent of the total.
In the forms, patients identified a total of 4,634 people who they believed they had been in contact with over the previous few days - an average of around two and a half each.
The number of contacts who were tracked down was 1,749, just 38 per cent of the total.
If all 4,456 of the confirmed Covid-19 patients had similar numbers of contacts, it suggests that as many as 11,200 people could have been close enough to them to become infected over recent days, of whom more than 9,000 are yet to be traced.
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