House of Commons briefing paper on testing

The House of Commons Library research service provides MPs and their staff with the impartial briefing and evidence base they need to do their work in scrutinising Government, proposing legislation, and supporting constituents. As well as providing MPs with a confidential service they publish open briefing papers, which are available on the Parliament website. 

In the briefing paper for the House of Commons, Coronavirus: Testing for Covid-19, it was clear that the IBMS was beginning to impact government thinking. It noted: 

1: There were reports during the early stages of the pandemic that some of the chemicals, or reagents, required for Covid-19 testing were in short supply (see Box 3). On 3 April 2020, the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) issued a press release on testing capacity.

2: Allan Wilson, President of the IBMS, told The Guardian that there were shortages of both the test kits as well as: some very basic reagents, such as the virology transport medium that we need to put the swabs in. The actual swabs are in short supply – effectively they are rationed in my patch in Scotland but I know there are problems in England as well.” The lysis buffer, used in extracting the RNA of the virus, was “in very, very short supply”, he said. So are precision plastics – “the little tubes and pipettes, so each test gets its own individual tube”. Those will not be available until mid-May. 

3: In addition, there have been some reports that capacity problems have been exacerbated by staff shortages as students and academics who were previously working in the labs return to their ‘day jobs’. Allan Wilson, president of the Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS), was quoted in The Telegraph as stating that labs “are trying to recruit biomedical scientists, but they are in short supply and the NHS is also looking. It is a competitive market.”

4: Allan Wilson, President of the IBMS, told The Times that NHS labs did not have enough test kits, were struggling to source both kits and reagents and that he would, therefore, be “surprised” if the 100,000 target was met by the end of April.

  The full paper is available to download below.