The Government was too slow to increase testing capacity to the levels required to help contain the spread of the coronavirus. We have previously suggested that strategy was driven by the capacity available, rather than strategy driving the necessary increase in capacity. It was clear early in the year that Public Health England was not set up for the mass scale necessary for coronavirus testing. This lesson had previously been learned by countries who dealt with the MERS outbreak of 2015, and it is regrettable that it is a lesson that the UK did not heed in advance of the pandemic.