THE head of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences has spoken of his "frustration" at the UK Government's "arbitrary" target of testing 200,000 people a day for coronavirus.

Allan Wilson, the president of the institute, said there should be a "more targeted" strategy to ensure labs across the country are not put under pressure.

Speaking to BBC Radio Scotland's Good Morning Scotland programme, Wilson said he felt "frustration" and "surprise" at the new target, set earlier this week for the end of May by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

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He said: "Given the fact that there was so much turmoil around the initial target of 100,000, to double that target, all it does is put pressure on the laboratories when it's really not required.

"What we need is a much more targeted approach to how we're going to reduce the transmission of this disease and reduce deaths, rather than another arbitrary, politically set target."

Wilson said the Government should set out where people will be tested, who will be tested and how often the tests will take place.

He said that approach would "link to an overall strategy" that would allow the spread of the virus to be tracked.

Wilson added: "We're not seeing that, we're really not seeing that at all.

"All we're seeing is them giving a number, and what we'd like to see is a target that says 'we're going to target this number of people under test, trace and isolate, we're going to test this number of key workers, this number of patients, this number of care workers and home care workers and this is where they're going to be tested'.

"Then they can do the rather simple arithmetic and say this is the number of tests we need and then say 'this is where we are going to do it'."

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He also said the Scottish Government had been more realistic in its testing capacity targets, as First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said last week there would be capacity for 15,500 tests by the end of May to help with efforts to test, trace and isolate.

Wilson also said some labs are working "hand to mouth" to provide testing across the UK.

He said: "We get deliveries of reagents and chemicals to do testing for a period of time, but there's no guarantee that there's another delivery coming behind that so we can maintain that capacity.

"That's going to continue for some time, there's still an international demand."

Wilson said for labs to be in a position to undertake mass testing, there would be a need to "be sure that we've got that stable, secure supply chain".