Government testing lies were bookended by more lies

The number of people tested from 24th April to 4th May were as follows (rounded to the nearest thousand): 23K, 26K, 26K, 30K, 33K, 54K, 73K, 64K, 56K, 63K, 70K.
The observant among you will notice the distinct absence of a ‘100K’ figure!

Despite what the propaganda of the billionaires tells us, the government have missed ALL THREE of their testing targets thus far. Here’s the details…..

On 18th March, the government declared a target to complete 10,000 tests per day “by the end of next week” which can either be seen as Friday 27th or Sunday 29th March. The first day with over 10K tests was 2nd April.

10,000 tests a day by 29th March – THEY MISSED THAT TARGET!

Also on 18th March, Boris Johnson stated: “We will massively scale up our testing capacity in the weeks ahead so we hit 25,000 tests a day” and the same day, a Dept of Health & Social Care Press Release stated that “the increased capacity is expected to be ready within four weeks” (so by 15th April). It wasn’t until 23rd April that the target was met.

25,000 tests a day by 15th April – THEY MISSED THAT TARGET!

On 5th April the ‘UK Prime Minister’ Twitter account stated: ‘We’ll test 100,000 people a day by the end of this month.’ On 30th April, 122,347 tests were officially recorded. However, only 73,191 people were tested. The difference is explained in two ways: firstly, some people were tested twice (it seems this accounts for an additional 8,787 tests) and the government also included the tests that were merely ordered/sent out that day – which they have now admitted was some 40,369!

And how did they suddenly get such a huge number of people to request tests to be sent to them purely so that they could meet their target? Simple: they emailed members of the Conservative Party urging them to request a test (with a click-button that took them to the test-requesting page of the government’s website!) Not people who specifically need them, not people with symptoms, not essential workers – just their own supporters…. and just so that they could boast that they had met their target. By any stretch of the imagination, they didn’t! That didn’t stop the billionaire-owned media acting as government cheerleaders and heralding the Government ‘meeting’ its target!

100,000 people tested a day by 30th April – THEY MISSED THAT TARGET IN TWO WAYS!!

And whilst the numbers remained high for one day as they continued to send out tests to Tory members, the test numbers then dropped right back down from 122K on 30th April to 76K just two days later when only 56K people were tested!

So, to recap…….

10,000 tests a day – they missed that target!
25,000 tests a day – they missed that target!
100,000 people tested a day – THEY MISSED THAT TARGET!!

I am pleased to see our testing levels finally increase. But I can’t give the government praise – not when it is desperately needed and is long overdue, not when they have lied about it and not when Germany was regularly doing 100K tests a day by the start of April!

Of course, testing alone merely tells you the extent of the problem and confirms to those who test positive that they should isolate. What is actually needed to stop the spread of the virus is a combination of testing, contact tracing and isolating. This is apparently being planned but, again, we are way behind compared with most other countries!

But the issue is not only about whether or not the government meets these targets: it is about whether we are willing to accept the fact that they constantly LIE about them! And it’s not only the testing that they lie about: it’s the PPE, it’s the notion that they are being ‘led by the science’ and, most importantly, it’s the death toll!

Based upon the Financial Times’ analysis of the Office for National Statistics data, the real UK Coronavirus death toll is some 20,000+ MORE than the government’s official toll. The reason for this is because our government are choosing to count only those people who died AND HAD TESTED POSITIVE FOR CORONAVIRUS!! And, as we know, throughout the pandemic thus far, they have hardly been testing anyone outside of hospitals! According to the FT/ONS numbers, this government has presided over around 50,000 deaths from the virus….. so far! Forget having just become ‘the worst in Europe’; we won that horrific ‘badge of honour’ some time ago!

We should…. We MUST not accept the lies!! It is beyond time that we demand the truth!

Included are three charts. The first shows four daily figures: tests, people tested, the difference between the two and then the percentage difference. The second is a bar chart of the ‘difference’ numbers and the third is a graph of the ‘percentage difference’.

‘Something’ happened on 30th April, carried on into 1st May and then dropped off, didn’t it? And now you know what!

Tom Lane