The point I was making as regards pillar 1 was that I was acknowledging that a large number of tests undertaken had been duplicate tests on medical staff, so whilst we may have carried out 13,165, 651 it doesn't follow that 13,165,651 people have been tested. Having said that I would have thought quite a few pillar 1 tests would still be getting carried out on frontline medical/care staff who have not yet tested positive for the virus. In fact I'd go as far as saying that it would be downright negligent if those people weren't being regularly tested.
Swab testing of NHS staff is taking place mate, and is basically being done to use spare capacity in Pillar 1. Patient testing at Pillar 1, including admissions, retests and test on discharge to care homes will be running at, very roughly, 25,000 tests a day, which leaves a gap of about 20,000.
In tandem with that, there's a project called SIREN going on which is doing PCR and antibody tests on staff, and they're aiming to get at least 10% of staff at each trust to enrol in that. Anyone enrolled will have fortnightly PCR and blood tests. If they're running at 10%, that's 140,000 a fortnight, so 70,000 a week, or 10,000 a day, so about half of the capacity gap from above. Off-hand, I don't know what the exact take up on that ( and I'm not sure if it's in the public domain so I won't make an educated guess here ), so 10,000 a day may be an under or over estimate.
Incidentally, tests in care homes will ( I think ) be almost exclusively sit in Pillar Two, so they likely basically sit in the "tests sent out" number ?
Also incidentally, less than 10 million tests have actually been carried out, there's a gap of about 3 million caused by ( not yet ) returned tests and tests returned incorrectly which couldn't be processed. It's still a heck of a lot of tests though, so I'm not belittling where we are on testing, because considering the low base we started from, processing more than 100,000 tests a day is a good result.
