The government recently admitted its labs are struggling to meet demand, forcing them to ration access to testing to reduce delays and voided tests.

Headline capacity figures look like they have plenty of headroom. So what's going on?

The government's been fudging the numbers.

When the government stopped its old Daily Reports and switched to the new dashboard, they only published one lab capacity figure.

This included pillar 3 (antibody) tests.

There's capacity to do 120,000 pillar 3 tests a day, but for the last month they've only done 4,000 a day!

Recently they started publishing a separate figure that only includes pillar 1, 2 and 4 (antigen swab) tests. This gives a better picture of what's really going on.

Removing the pillar 3 (antibody) test capacity, which can't be used for anything else, shows labs at 80% capacity.

But even that doesn't tell the whole story.

In the old Daily Reports there was a separate capacity figure for each pillar.

There's some overlap, as seen recently when pillar 4 surveillance tests were delayed by lab capacity being diverted to handle a backlog of pillar 2 tests.

But it's not clear if the same holds true for pillars 1 and 2.

Pillar 1 is processed by NHS and PHE labs.
Pillar 2 is processed by the Lighthouse labs and commercial partners.

If Pillar 2 runs out of capacity, are excess tests sent to hospitals for processing? Seems unlikely.

So what's the real capacity available for pillar 2 tests?

The government won't say.

But the last figures from the old Daily Reports showed pillar 2 labs already at 100% capacity in mid August!

This covers home tests, care home testing, mobile units, walk in and drive in sites.

Since then overall capacity has only increased by 10%.

Which may explain why the number of pillar 2 tests being processed has hit a hard ceiling of 125,000 tests a day for the last two weeks.

Despite the reassuring graphs, Pillar 2 testing may actually be running at capacity!

Once again the government isn't being straight with us, and vital data which used to give a clearer picture of what's going on has been withdrawn without explanation.

It joins the number of people tested each day and the number of tests sent out but not used in the memory hole.

Meanwhile cases are rising, care home testing is behind schedule, test results are being delayed or voided, tests are being rationed to avoid overwhelming labs, and only 50,000 tests a day of additional capacity is due to come online by the end of October.

It doesn't bode well.