Coronavirus: North East bids to control local tracing

Hospital trust chief operating officer Martin Wilson said Newcastle's Lighthouse lab would be the largest

Health bosses in the north-east of England are pushing to be allowed to run their own coronavirus tracing.

The Newcastle Hospitals Trust is due to open a new Lighthouse lab able to process 80,000 tests a day in January.

The trust will also run a co-ordination hub providing virus data to help public health teams respond to local cases.

Chief operating officer Martin Wilson said it was "making very strong representations" to government about also localising contact tracing.

"We are keen to see a move to localised tracking and tracing," he said.

The trust was "still in discussions" about how the work of the Co-ordination Response Centre (CRC) hub could be extended to include this, he said.

The Department of Health and Social Care said local and national teams were "working closely together".

More than 150 councils were "provided with extensive data and supported to manage local outbreaks" with a ring-fenced group of contact tracers, a spokesperson said.

Prof Eugene Milne said local staff understood local context better than remote call handlers could

Newcastle City Council director of public health Prof Eugene Milne said the council wanted to "stand the system on its head" to have local teams managing cases and controlling work allocated to Test and Trace call handlers.

"Instead of the initial contact being through somebody remote, from a telephone number that you don't know, from somebody who doesn't know the local situation, the first call is from somebody who does understand all of those things," he said.

Talks were under way on whether the private companies currently running the tracing system would accept that, he said.

The Newcastle Lab will have a capacity of 80,000 tests a day

Most of the 1,000 lab staff would be analysing swab samples from people in the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside who had taken tests at home or at walk-in or drive-in centres.

About 100 staff would work in the CRC to give public health teams "that real intelligence about where the cases are and they can act on it", Mr Wilson said.

If local tracing was not allowed, lab results would be fed back into the centralised system to be sent out to individuals and passed to Test and Trace.

British Medical Association North East chairman Dr George Rae said contact tracing should be led by local public health teams, whose "expertise and knowledge" had not been used enough.

"I'm not saying that you don't want the national system but I think that the equilibrium has been massively imbalanced up to now," he said.

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