Downing Street has insisted it remains on target to ensure 100,000 tests a day for coronavirus by the end of the month – despite the latest figures showing only a fifth of this number are being carried out. At the daily briefing for lobby journalists, the prime minister’s spokesman disclosed the statistics while defending the decision to allow Michael Gove’s daughter to be tested for the illness – at a time when some NHS and care home staff are still waiting to be tested themselves. The test came back negative, meaning that Gove was no longer obliged to self-isolate at home with the rest of his family. The fact that Gove was no longer self-isolating emerged when he was seen jogging in a park near his London home. On 25 March, at the last prime minister’s questions before the Easter recess , Boris Johnson told MPs that the government was “massively increasing” testing up to 25,000 per day. Later that day he told a press conference that “hopefully very soon” he wanted to reach a target of 250,000 tests a day, although when Matt Hancock, the health secretary, set a formal target to be achieved by the end of April, he settled on 100,000 tests a day.
At the Monday briefing, the PM’s spokesman said that in the 24-hour period up to 9am on Sunday, 18,000 tests were carried out in Great Britain. He said that 2,630 of those tests involved NHS staff being tested at drive-through sites, and that a total of 42,812 NHS staff and their family members had now been tested. That marked “significant progress on where we were a little over a week ago”, the spokesman claimed.
When it was put to him that the government was still a long way off the 100,000-a-day target set by Hancock, the spokesman said he did not accept that. “New capacity is coming on stream all the time,” he said, stressing that there were now 23 drive-through centres open where NHS staff could get tested. It also emerged that Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, had arranged for his daughter to be tested after she developed coronavirus symptoms. The test came back negative, meaning that Gove was no longer obliged to self-isolate at home with the rest of his family.
The spokesman said this had been done on the advice of Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, and was justified on the grounds that Gove was one of the figures leading the government’s response to coronavirus. Asked why Gove could not work from home, the spokesman said Gove chaired one of the key ministerial groups dealing with coronavirus (one covering the public sector) and it was “beneficial” for him to be able to go into the office. At the briefing it also emerged that the cabinet as a whole may not be involved in the decision, due to be formally taken this week, to extend the lockdown announced by Johnson exactly three weeks ago.
Although it normally meets on a Tuesday, no meeting has been scheduled for this week. With Johnson recovering at Chequers after his spell in intensive care, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary and first secretary of state, is deputising in his absence. The spokesman said the main work coordinating the government’s response to coronavirus was being done by the morning No 10 meeting, chaired by Raab, and by the four coronavirus ministerial groups. It is seen as inevitable that the lockdown will be extended, and No 10 said the reasoning would be formally explained when the decision is formally announced, which has to be by Thursday.