Tally of UK Covid-19 infections soar after error in 'world-beating' track and trace system

October 5, 2020

Britain has reported a jump in daily Covid-19 cases to a record 22,961 after authorities said a technical issue left over 15,000 test results not transferred into computer systems on time.

News of the glitch was likely to cast further doubt over the robustness of the national test-and-trace system Prime Minister Boris Johnson said would be "world-beating" but which has experienced repeated setbacks.

Yesterday's daily cases figure represented a dramatic jump from the 12,872 cases reported the day before. 

The numbers were published hours behind schedule, just after a statement from Public Health England about the technical problem.

"Today and yesterday's headline numbers are largely due to the backlog of cases flowing through the total reporting process," PHE said in a statement.

The issue, which was identified on Friday and has now been resolved, left 15,841 cases not uploaded into reporting dashboards used by the National Health Service contact-tracing system.

"We fully understand the concern this may cause and further robust measures have been put in place," said PHE interim chief executive, Michael Brodie.

The authority said all the people concerned had been given their results in a timely fashion and those with positive results had been told to self-isolate.

In terms of tracing the contacts of the infected people, PHE said the information had been transferred to the relevant systems over the weekend and contact tracers were now working urgently to catch up.

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