COVID-19: Surge testing will allow UK to come down on outbreaks ‘like a tonne of bricks’

Nationwide surge testing will help the UK come down on coronavirus outbreaks “like a tonne of bricks” as lockdown is eased, the foreign secretary has told Sky News.

Dominic Raab said mass lateral flow testing for COVID-19 would form a “key part” of the strategy to allow the UK to “ease out of lockdown safely and responsibly”, alongside the continuing vaccine rollout and treatments for the virus.

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He said the aim was to carry out testing “at scale and at pace, so that when you do have upticks of the virus, we can come down on it like a tonne of bricks”.

Sky News understands that plans for nationwide surge testing across England will form part of the next stage of moving out of the current restrictions.

The move to extend asymptomatic testing is likely to be announced by the prime minister when he reveals his “roadmap” out of lockdown on Monday.

The plan is to send out hundreds of thousands of rapid lateral flow tests to people’s homes and workplaces to check people who don’t have symptoms to try to pick up coronavirus clusters before they form in the community.

Sky’s political correspondent Kate McCann said the aim was “to make sure all of us, when we are going about our daily business, can know that we are not passing on the virus to those around us”.

“This is going to be key as the cases in the community come down to make sure that when there are small numbers of cases in an area they can be isolated quickly and they don’t expand into clusters, because the one thing that the government knows it needs to make sure now is that this is the final lockdown – there are no further national lockdowns from here,” she said.

“So what you are going to start hearing about is those testing schemes – those may even include specific workplaces too further down the line to make sure that case numbers stay low when we move out of this next stage.”

The Times said there would be mass testing before some schools reopen next month, and the Department for Health and Social Care has not denied suggestions that rapid-result tests will be a big part of the return to normality.

The newspaper said a scheme called ‘Are You Ready? Get Testing. Go’ would see the lateral flow tests being sent out every day, similar to the scheme being run by more than 70% of England’s local authorities.

It comes amid calls for the prime minister to be cautious with the easing of restrictions.

The NHS is likely to remain under pressure for at least another six weeks, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts in England, has warned.

In a letter to Boris Johnson, he said case numbers were “still far too high” and the health service remained “at full stretch”, something he said trust leaders believed would continue for at least another six to eight weeks.

He said: “The evidence on COVID-19 cases, NHS capacity, progress with vaccinations and readiness to combat COVID-19 variants all show that it is much too early to start lifting restrictions.”

Mr Johnson has said he will look at the data this week on case numbers, hospital admissions, deaths and the impact of the vaccine rollout as he considers how to reduce restrictions.

The Daily Mail reported that holiday lets could be open in time for the Easter weekend and that pubs could open in May but that only a maximum of two households would be allowed to mix indoors.

The Daily Telegraph reported the number of new cases would have to fall to below 1,000 per day before lockdown is softened – a long way from the 10,625 confirmed cases reported on Tuesday.

This was echoed by Steve Paterson, professor of genetics at Liverpool University, who told Sky News the number of new cases should be “in the low thousands per day”.

A DHSC spokesman said: “We have not finalised further plans for testing.”

Earlier on Tuesday, the head of the UK’s vaccine taskforce Clive Dix told Sky News that every adult in the UK could receive both doses of a coronavirus vaccine by August or September “or maybe sooner if we need to”.

(c) Sky News 2021: COVID-19: Surge testing will allow UK to come down on outbreaks ‘like a tonne of bricks’