WATCH: Corbyn calls lack of testing for NHS and care workers “ludicrous”

Jeremy Corbyn has declared that the government’s failure to provide testing for NHS and care workers is “ludicrous”, and said that he had raised the issue of testing with the Prime Minister three weeks ago.

In an interview with Sky News this afternoon, the outgoing Labour leader told viewers that  the government has been too slow to act in scaling up coronavirus testing.

He said: “The fact that we are not yet even testing 10,000 people a day is very, very serious indeed. There are almost half a million people working in the NHS and care sector – even they have not been tested. It is ludicrous.”

The government has come under increasing pressure as levels of testing for NHS staff and care sector workers remains low, and a growing number are having to self-isolate after displaying symptoms of the virus.

Corbyn added: “The superhuman efforts of people throughout the NHS… is wonderful and we should applaud them, but we shouldn’t have had ten years of austerity where we ended up with 94% bed occupancy in the NHS and obviously a difficulty coping because of that.”

The Labour leader also stated that he and the Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth met with the Prime Minister and spoke specifically about the need to increase testing three weeks ago.

He said: “Here we are now all these weeks later, we’re not even reaching 10,000 a day. And it’s apparently because there’s a shortage of test equipment… because they seem to be running on the idea that it wasn’t necessary to test.”

Earlier today, Labour’s Shami Chakrabarti told Sky News that the UK is “failing in both clarity and delivery” on testing and called for the publication of a detailed national strategy.

GMB recently warned that the care system is in danger of “total collapse” due to the coronavirus health crisis and issued five demands to the government to support care workers.

Labour’s shadow health team wrote to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock today calling for a “coordinated approach” to ensure that the care sector is supported through the coronavirus pandemic.

There are a total of 29,474 recorded cases of coronavirus in the UK, although the true figure is thought to be higher. 2,352 people across the country have died from the disease.