England test-and-trace glitch blamed for spread of India Covid variant

A glitch in the government’s £37bn test-and-trace system may have helped fuel the spread of a highly-transmissible Covid variant in one of the UK’s worst-hit towns, it has emerged.

The software error meant that more than 700 infected people and their close contacts were not promptly passed on to local health teams, allowing them to potentially spread the disease further.

The number of missing cases was highest in Blackburn with Darwen, where about 300 people are believed to have been lost in the system during a faulty IT upgrade. The Lancashire town is battling one of the UK’s largest outbreaks of the fast-spreading variant first identified in India. Labour has described the news as “jaw-dropping”.

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Source: The Guardian, 20 May 2021