UK is among the most affected European countries by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The country has the biggest death toll from Europe: over 36,000 people have died after getting infected with the disease. Russia has many more cases of infected people (326,448), but it has only 3,249 people that died because of the virus. While many other countries are experiencing a significant downfall of the COVID-19 infections and deaths, we can’t say the same about the UK. These are the stats brought by worldometers.info.
But the UK is facing even more problems that are taking many by surprise. Sky News has learned that about four percent of swab tests for COVID-19 conducted in Milton Keynes’ Lighthouse Laboratory have been “unclear.” This means that there are thousands of tests for the terrifying virus.
UK Prime Minister promises an extra of 200,000 daily tests
Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of UK, promises that he will increase the number of daily tests with 200,000 for each day until the end of May. When a test doesn’t show a clear outcome, the person tested is asked to repeat the test, and he or she will receive the following message:
“Your COVID-19 test has come back UNCLEAR. Please seek a repeat test via the route you used previously.”
David Bonsall, who is a researcher at Oxford’s Big Data Institute, spoke about the importance of keeping the pace with the virus:
“For contact tracing to work, it has to be quick.
There’s no point in contact tracing if you’re tracing people and finding individuals after they have infected others, you have to catch up with the virus.
It’s the virus that determines how quick testing needs to be, and it does need to be very fast indeed.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has infected over 5.2 million people throughout the world. 335,162 of them had died, while 2,097.402 had been recovered. Worldometers.info also brought these stats.
