Piers Morgan hits out at Government missing coronavirus testing figures

Piers Morgan has hit out at the Government for missing vital coronavirus testing figures.

The Good Morning Britain host addressed the news that the vast majority of new Covid-19 cases are being left out of public data on local outbreaks, as figures suggest.

Speaking on today’s show, Piers began: ‘It’s blatant lying again. It’s a total scam. There are two pillars of cases and they’re only identifying the first one, which is the very insular one involving health care workers and key workers who get testing.

‘They’re not including the vast majority of cases, so this has snuck up on the people of Leicester.

‘This is the Government data on cases and this is why there’s no trust in the Government – because they’re once again smoke and mirrors.’

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He continued: ‘If Matt Hancock had the guts to come on here we’d be asking why have they not been including Pillar 2. Why have you not been including the vast majority of cases? Why have you allowed this to happen?’

How can you plan if you don’t know the full extent of positive tests in your area? co-host Susanna Reid added.

The Government is using localised data to decide when lockdown measures need to be reintroduced in specific areas, as occurred in Leicester on Monday night.

But the Government’s publicly-accessible Covid tracker omitted more than 90 per cent of the city’s most recent cases, according to data obtained by the Leicester Mercury.

Nationwide data indicates the tracker is failing to show three-quarters of new cases on average in any given local area across much of the country.

While the full data is being used by public health bodies, it is not automatically available to local authorities who say they need it to prepare for local lockdowns.

Case numbers are divided between figures collected from NHS labs – called Pillar 1 – and those collected from commercial testing partners – Pillar 2 – which include universities and companies such as Boots, according to the UK government website.

The national total includes all these figures, whereas data published on the government Covid tracker only shows Pillar 1 figures in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Pillar 2 data is only included in the figures for Wales. This is explained in a note on an ‘about’ page accompanying the tracker but no indication is given of just how much data is missing.

A graph shared by Public Health England (PHE) at a meeting on June 23 and obtained by the Leicester Mercury shows that in the preceding days over 90 per cent of new cases were from Pillar 2.

In contrast, the Pillar 1 figures, which made up the vast majority of new local cases while the UK outbreak was at its peak, had dropped to just a handful per day.

According to PHE-published data collated by the Financial Times, Pillar 2 figures now consistently account for the majority of new Covid cases across all of England as the overall scale of the outbreak shrinks.

Good Morning Britain airs weekdays at 6am on ITV.

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