Boris Johnson: Contacts of missing positive Covid tests now being traced
Boris Johnson has said that contacts of all 16,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus, but were not logged into the database, are now being contacted by NHS Test and Trace.
Johnson said that some of the missing data “got truncated and it was lost”, but that everyone who tested positive has been contacted and that “they’re now working through all the contacts as well”.
A technical glitch saw the country’s Covid numbers underreported for a number of days, leading to around 16,000 tests not logged in the database.
This saw the number of daily Covid cases surge to more than 22,000 last night, which included many of the positive tests recorded earlier last week.
The glitch has likely led to people with coronavirus not knowing to take a test and self-isolate.
“What happened here was that some of the data got truncated and it was loss, but what they’ve done now is not only contacted all the people who were identified as having the disease, that was done in the first place, but they’re now working through all the contacts as well,” Johnson said.
“The key thing I would say is, and it goes for everybody, that if you’re contacted by NHS test and trace then you must self isolate.”
The number of positive tests seen in England last week were lower than expected, leading some to speculate that the Prime Minister’s new stringent restrictions were working.
However, Johnson said it will only be known if the new measures – such as banning more than six people from different households to meet up anywhere – had curbed the spread of the virus.
“The incidents that we’re seeing in the cases corresponds to where we thought we were and to be frank the slightly lower numbers we’ve seen didn’t really reflect where we thought the disease was likely to go,” Johnson said.
“These numbers are realistic.
“The crucial thing is that in the next few days, weeks we will see more clearly if some of the new restrictions we have brought in – the extra enforcement of the rule of six, the extra enforcement of self isolation, the rules on masks and so on – we’ll see if that starts to work in driving down the virus.”