UK lawmakers say testing lapses increased nursing home toll

LONDON (AP) — An influential group of British lawmakers on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government of failing to conduct enough tests for the new coronavirus, saying the lapse helped COVID-19 cut a deadly swath through U.K. nursing homes.

As official statistics revealed more than 11,000 coronavirus deaths in British nursing homes, the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said “testing capacity has been inadequate for most of the pandemic so far.”

In a letter to the prime minister, committee chairman Greg Clark said Britain’s limited testing capacity “drove strategy, rather than strategy driving capacity.”

U.K. authorities initially sought to trace and test everyone who had been in contact with people infected with the coronavirus. But they abandoned that strategy in mid-March as the number of infections overwhelmed the country’s testing resources.

Johnson’s Conservative government has faced growing criticism as Britain suffers one of the world’s worst coronavirus death tolls. The government’s official tally of deaths among people who tested positive for the virus stands at 34,796, second only to the U.S. When suspected as well as confirmed cases are added, the toll is well over 40,000.

More than 11,000 of those deaths occurred in nursing homes in England and Wales, according to figures compiled by the Office for National Statistics.

Clark, a lawmaker from the governing Conservative Party, said the “pivotal” decision in March to stop testing for the coronavirus outside of hospitals meant that nursing home residents and staff weren't tested “at a time when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant.”

The country’s testing capacity has now been scaled up to more than 100,000 tests a day, and the...