Covid-19 testing 'too late and too few in numbers' says senior Sheffield councillor

Coun George Lindars-Hammond, Sheffield Council cabinet member for health and social care, told a scrutiny meeting the lack of testing had had a serious impact.

He said: “Throughout this crisism, it’s clear that nationally the magnitude, speed and volume of testing has not kept up to where we needed to be.

“It's clear all care homes, the council and the NHS would have been in a better position had we had unfettered access to testing any residents we were concerned about at an earlier stage.

“This needs to be looked at with a public enquiry. The numbers of people tested are far less than the government claims it has carried out and we have really seen the impact of testing simply not picking up this outbreak.”

Although care homes were hit badly by the virus, health bosses said the expected ‘tsunami’ of cases never hit the city's hospitals.

Nicki Doherty, of NHS Sheffield clinical commissioning group, said: “We were expecting a huge impact on hospital capacity with people needing critical and respiratory care.

“We thought we would need to empty hospitals and we put a lot of effort into how primary care could support people in their own homes, how we could support care homes and lots of hotels come forward saying they could be part of it.

“The reality was we didn't need to because the tsunami didn't happen and the hospitals actually had capacity.”

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