Our testing network is envy of the world
THE remarkable success of our vaccination rollout has been a breath of fresh air for the whole country. But while we continue adding hundreds of thousands of people to our immunity tally every day, we must remain vigilant, particularly in light of emerging variants of concern.
As we cautiously lift the restrictions necessary to keep us safe for these past months, we can continue to protect our family, our friends and our colleagues by getting into the habit of regular rapid testing.
Workplace testing is already in place for thousands of employees and it is going to be fundamental to reopening our businesses and keeping them open. So from today, we are inviting any business with more than 10 workers, which is not able to set up its own testing on site, to sign up for free lateral flow tests that can be used at home.
Expanded workplace testing offers a way forward to building back better. For now, even as we test to work, it’s imperative that everyone who can work from home still does so.
In the year that has passed since the first lockdown, we have built the largest diagnostics network in our history from scratch: the equivalent of constructing a supermarket chain the size of Sainsbury’s in under two months.
Our testing capacity has skyrocketed. Between the vast PCR swab testing system we have built over the last year, for people with symptoms, and the mass rollout of rapid lateral flow tests, for people without symptoms, we are now regularly carrying out more than one million Covid-19 tests a day, with nearly 120,000,000 carried out in total.this gives us one of the world’s highest, per capita, testing rates. Behind these numbers are countless lives saved.
We are now regularly testing over five per cent of the population per week for a disease we had not even heard of a little over a year ago. And it’s not just the testing programme that has ramped up; it’s the speed with which we’re using it.
Latest data shows that more than 88 per cent of in-person tests were back within 24 hours, and almost 91 per cent of close contacts of infected people subsequently reached.
With around one in three positive Covid cases not showing symptoms, we know regular, rapid testing of employees will be pivotal to our journey out of this pandemic.
Thanks to the UK’S worldleading expertise on genomics we are able to sequence 32,000 samples a week, allowing us to identify mutations and to take action. Last week we announced we are backing a new technology to pick up on variants even more quickly, cutting our response time to hours rather than days.
We might be done with coronavirus, but it not yet done with us. Fortunately we have assembled one of our most versatile toolkits for keeping this dreadful disease at bay: a testing infrastructure delivering millions of PCR and rapid tests a day, genomics capabilities the envy of the world and a tracing system that will have contacted over
100 people in the time it takes you to read this piece.