MATT Hancock has promised that the UK will ramp up coronavirus testing to more than 100,000 a day.
The Health Secretary made the promise as he returned to work yesterday after a week of self-isolation following his brush with Covid-19.
“Our ultimate goal is that anyone who needs a test can have one,” he said at the daily Downing Street briefing.
The Government has been fiercely criticised in recent days over its lack of testing, particularly for frontline staff.
It turns out that just 2800 NHS staff in England have been tested for coronavirus at drive-in facilities.
In Scotland, 3400 NHS workers or their family members have now been tested.
Hancock said the UK lacked a large diagnostics industry, unlike Germany, which was having to start from a “lower base”.
Fixing that was one of the pledges in his new “five-pillar” plan on testing.
The other key vows include a hike in swab testing in Public Health England and NHS labs; more use of commercial partners to test, and surveillance to determine the rate of infection.
The other key pledge was to introduce antibody blood tests to determine whether people have had Covid-19.
Hancock said: “Blood tests are designed to tell whether people have had the virus and are now immune.
“The tests are done by taking a blood sample and looking for the presence of the right Covid-19 antibodies.
“This could potentially be done at home with a finger prick and deliver results in as little as 20 minutes.
“We are currently working with nine companies who have offered these tests and evaluating their effectiveness.
“These antibody blood tests offer the hope that people who think they have had the disease will know they are immune and can get back to life as much as possible as normal. But they have got to work.”
He said some of the tests that they had tried had failed to find four out of five cases of the virus.
“No test is better than a bad test,” he said.
The health secretary also raised the prospect of an immunity certificate to allow those who have had the disease to travel freely.
But, he later warned, while testing was critical “the number one thing that stops the spread of this virus is social distancing”.
“There’s been a lot in the news in the last couple of days about testing and I understand how people crave wanting to know their coronavirus status, I get that, but the number one message for everyone is to stay at home.
“Because the more people who stay at home, the fewer transmissions they’ll be, the quicker, we’ll be through it. That is the number one thing.”
The Cabinet minister defended his decision to prioritise testing of patients over NHS staff and said he thought any health secretary would have done the same.
“I took the decision that the first priority has to be the patients for whom the results of a test could be the difference in treatment that is the difference between life and death,” he said.
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