LONDON (Reuters) – Britain plans to regularly position the entire population for COVID-19 so that it can suppress the spread of the virus and alleviate the restrictions that have paralyzed its economy without triggering a momentary wave in one of the most affected countries in the world.
Health Minister Matt Hancock said the government is testing a variety of new and faster tests that can produce instant effects and hoped to implement them until the end of the year.
“The massive evidence, the population tests, in which we make sure that other people are regularly tested, so that we can allow some freedoms to return, is a huge task of the government right now,” he told BBC Radio.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has been criticized by parties to the political conflict and fitness experts for being too slow to block and test to find out how the virus had spread.
Britain now has the death toll in Europe, more than 50,000, and the internal economic downturn of any complex primary economy.
Hancock said the country’s research labs at Porton Down were testing new saliva tests they don’t want to move to a lab for faster results.
“There are new technologies coming in the right direction that we’re buying and testing now,” he said.”We’re going to bring it up for the rest of this year.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised Mass there after her first local COVID-19 case in 102 days.
Generalization is perceived as a way to reopen the economy, which suffered a record 20% contraction this quarter and unemployment is expected to rise when the government ends its massive employment subsidy program in October.
“Difficult times have come,” finance minister Rishi Sunak said last week.
New testing approaches that do wish to be treated in laboratories can also trigger a re-evaluation of the UK’s policy of requiring travellers from countries such as Spain and France to be quarantined.
London’s Heathrow Airport said Wednesday that a verification domain could be opened if Britain passed a rule replaces and would allow two controls, one on arrival and one a few days later, to reduce quarantine time for travellers in the existing two weeks.
“The resolve to develop massive testing and use new techniques will inspire others to resume facets of daily life that may concern them,” said Sian Griffiths, emeritus professor of public fitness at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“Receiving this data in a shorter period of time will allow additional care under conditions such as airports.”
For existing laboratory tests, the UK government says it currently has a daily testing capability of more than 335,000, between 150,000 and 190,000 tests were processed in August each day.
By comparison, the German Association of Testing Laboratories said Tuesday that the country had about 750,000 of a weekly capacity of one million tests and therefore a higher proportion of its capacity.
Cases in Britain need to rise again, with more than 1,000 positive effects in 8 of the last 10 days.
The government announced Wednesday that it would extend a verification review conducted through the Office of National Statistics of 28,000 other people to 150,000 through October and, however, to 400,000 to help identify a better national picture of the pandemic and identify local outbreaks.
Additional report through Sarah Young in London and Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt; Edited by Michael Holden and Catherine Evans
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