‘The good news, testing kits are coming - but bad news is the equipment to record results isn’t here’

THOUSANDS of coronavirus testing kits were due to arrive in Leicester last week as part of the government’s planned mass testing programme.

Public health officials at Leicester City Council said the first batch of lateral flow kits, which are supposed to give rapid results, were due from the Department of Health and Social Care.

The process of getting the tests out to people is, however, unlikely to begin until sometime next week.

The council’s public health director, Professor Ivan Browne, pictured, said: “We got an e-mail on Thursday night to say that we would be getting a delivery of tests some time today (Friday).

“That is the good news. The bad news is that the devices we need to actually record those tests won’t be arriving with them.

“We are told we’ll be updated about that next week.

“Clearly we can’t roll it out until we can put the data up there.”

Prof Browne said there would be an initial 10,000 tests.

He said: “The way we will be operating this is very similar to the City Reach programme.”

This involved volunteers going door-to-door in parts of the city where there were high levels of infection in the summer delivering kits.”

Leicestershire County Council is also hoping to be receiving large quantities of new testing kits next week and will reveal more details of how they will be administered as soon as it can.

Lateral flow tests can process samples without the need for laboratory equipment, with most generating results in under half an hour.

They are also able to detect coronavirus in people who do not show symptoms and are being used in the Liverpool testing pilot.

While the swabbing and processing needs to be conducted by trained personnel, health officials are now looking at how the test could be selfadministered.