The government’s excuse for why it didn’t engage in a comprehensive testing and tracking approach to contain Covid-19 after it started to spread throughout the community was that – unlike Germany and South Korea – it did not have the sufficient number of labs to process the tests. Well that excuse is almost exhausted, because testing capacity is increasing rapidly.
Take for example the new super lab being built in Cambridge by AstraZeneca (AZN) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), using equipment and technology made in the UK by Primer Design, the molecular diagnostics division of Novacyt.
AZN’s chief executive Pascal Soriot tells me that tests will start any day now and that it will have the capacity to process 30,000 tests per day as soon as early May. From a standing start just a couple of weeks ago, a huge new testing facility is close to completion.
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