The Latest: UK government accused of virus testing failures

The Latest on the coronavirus pandemic. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death.

TOP OF THE HOUR:

— As United States, Europe reopen more, big nations see rising virus toll.

— British lawmakers accuse government of testing failures.

— Virus cases in India surge past 100,000.

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LONDON — An influential group of British lawmakers is accusing the government of failing to conduct enough tests for the new coronavirus, saying the lapse helped COVID-19 cut a deadly swath through the country’s nursing homes.

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee says that “testing capacity has been inadequate for most of the pandemic so far.” In a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, committee chairman Greg Clark said Britain’s testing capacity “drove strategy, rather than strategy driving capacity.”

U.K. authorities initially sought to trace and test everyone who had been in contact with people infected with the coronavirus. But they abandoned that strategy in mid-March as the number of infections overwhelmed the country’s limited testing capacity.

Clark, a lawmaker from the governing Conservatives, said that “pivotal” decision meant that nursing home residents and staff were not tested “at a time when the spread of the virus was at its most rampant.” Thousands of nursing home residents have died with COVID-19.

The country’s testing capacity has now been scaled up to more than 100,000 tests a day, and the government plans to reintroduce a “test, track and trace” policy as part of plans to control the virus and ease the nationwide lockdown.

But the committee also said that “it is not...