Testing turnaround times given boost in Wales

Welsh Health Minister Vaughan Gething has announced nearly £32 million to speed up coronavirus testing result turnaround times.

It is hoped that the investment will deliver faster results for contact tracing and ensure Wales is prepared for any increases in cases during the autumn and winter. The investment in Public Health Wales laboratory services will deliver faster results for contact tracing and ensure Wales is prepared for any increases in cases during the autumn and winter.

The funding will cover extra staff and equipment for the Public Health Wales regional laboratories based at University Hospital Wales, Cardiff, Morriston Hospital, Swansea and Ysbyty Glan Clwyd Rhyl, so they can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The money will also pay for the creation of six Hot Labs at acute hospitals across Wales, which will have rapid, under four hour, testing equipment and new testing equipment for other conditions to free up staff to work on coronavirus testing. The six new Hot labs will be up and running in November.

Gething said: “This investment will ensure we have the laboratory capacity in Wales to deliver our Test, Trace, Protect strategy to keep coronavirus under control, and be ready for the winter. I hope we don’t need to use all the testing capacity this investment will create but we have to be prepared. The science tells us the virus will spread more quickly in the colder, wetter months so we can expect an increase in spread later this year.

“This investment will increase our resilience and ensure our testing and contact tracing systems are robust enough to deal with whatever winter brings. We all want to be able to return to normal life and to ease restrictions as much as possible. Our Test, Trace, Protect strategy is key to achieving that, by enabling us to quickly identify people with coronavirus symptoms; identify new hotspots and isolate as many contacts as possible.”

The Welsh Government believes it can avoid the total lockdown seen in the spring, with the Coronavirus Control Plan for Wales aiming to tackle clusters of infections through contract tracing. It sets out how local or national restrictions could be introduced if cases begin to rise.

Under the plan, cases and clusters would be dealt with through contact tracing and isolation. A cluster or complicated case that suggests there may be a risk of wider transmission will be dealt with as an incident, where more local testing may be carried out. If this develops into a wider spread of the virus, this would be declared as an outbreak.