Six months on, with the virus surging again, authorities can point to dramatically expanded testing capacity.
Britain alone carried out some 1.3 million tests in a recent week -- a 20-fold increase from early April.[France and Spain, Covid hotspots, have likewise increased their capabilities.
The ramp-up is helping authorities identify thousands of infected individuals, a key step toward curbing the pathogen without resorting to economically devastating lockdowns. But cracks are emerging. The mass testing is straining labs, slowing results and complicating the contact tracing that’s crucial to contain the virus. And many with the disease are ignoring rules on self-isolation.
“That warps everything,” said James Naismith, a professor of structural biology at Oxford University. “Testing is only useful if it’s paired with rigorous contact tracing and isolation.”
In France, the government made tests free and widely available, recently ratcheting up the total to 1.2 million a week. That’s led to “gridlock in access to tests, especially in some large cities where the virus circulates a lot,” Health Minister Olivier Veran said Thursday.
Until recently, more than 99% of tests were coming back negative in some nations -- a far cry from positive rates of as much as half during the spring. Nowhere has the turnabout been more pronounced -- or the political heat more intense -- than the U.K., which lagged behind other European countries in testing early on but has now been doing more of it than any of its continental neighbors.