Army could help deliver rapid testing programme in city

RAPID coronavirus testing will also be rolled out more widely in Bristol, with repeat testing for specific groups planned and the possibility that the Army will be called in to help.

The rapid ‘lateral flow antigen’ tests were deployed in a successful pilot in Liverpool to help it out of tier 3 and into tier 2.

Now the rapid tests are on their way to parts of the wider population in Bristol, probably for people in high risk occupations such as supermarket workers and bus drivers.

Director of public health Christina Gray said Bristol City Council has just received its first batch of the rapid tests. But the council can only order a limited number of the tests, so will be carrying out a pilot to decide where they would be most useful, she said.

The council is also waiting to hear from the government about further rapid community testing available under tier 3, with the possibility of military personnel being drafted in to help.

“We’ve only just received our first delivery of 10,000 tests and we have to have a plan for deployment of those tests, and we have to have that plan signed off by the Department of Health and Social Care,” Ms Gray told the Post.

“There’s a lot of logistics to get that set up and a lot of clinical governance to make sure that it’s done safely. We’ve just started that process. So we get 10,000 initial tests, and then we can order [enough] tests [for] up to 10 per cent of our population.

“So we won’t have tests for the whole of the population.”

Ms Gray said clinical leaders were still deciding who to target with the rapid testing.

“It will be places like high-risk occupations ... who tend to be individuals who’ve got front-line facing work,” she said. “We need to look at both what we know about high-risk occupations and what we’re seeing in our data to deploy those tests to best effect, and we’ll need to pilot them initially to see that we’ve got it right.”