Testing, Testing

Today, the Health Secretary has announced £500 million to trial new technologies that can speed up coronavirus testing and assist with repeat testing, helping us to continue controlling the virus and getting life back to normal. Testing is a vital line of defence against coronavirus. Britain's testing system is one of the best in the world: we have rapidly scaled up our testing capacity from 2,000 tests per day in March to 300,000 per day currently, and have now carried out over 16 million tests in the UK.   The government is now levelling up the testing system by rolling out trials to assess the benefits of repeat population testing, while we continue to trial for a new rapid test, using the latest cutting-edge technology, which aims to deliver results within 20 minutes.   If we can roll out rapid and repeated testing, chains of transmission will be broken almost immediately by delivering on-the-spot results – helping to control the virus and get us back to a more normal way of life.