A fortnight ago, Andy Burnham and Matt Hancock met face-to-face in a TV studio. On March 18’s edition of BBC Question Time - filmed without a studio audience - Greater Manchester’s mayor grilled the health secretary on his claim that frontline worker testing would be ramped up to 25,000 a day within a month.
Mr Burnham, himself a former health secretary, reported ‘a lot of skepticism’ within the upper echelons of the NHS here about whether that was really possible. “People are saying they can’t see how that’s going to be delivered any time soon, because it requires standing down screening capacity and freeing up lab capacity in other parts of the NHS,” he said. “And I think people are struggling to see when that will come through.” In