THE UK Government is unlikely to announce this week whether it has or has not reached its target of 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by Thursday because of a “time-lag” in reporting the test results, Downing St has suggested.
However, despite the delay, No 10 insisted it remained committed to hitting the target by midnight on April 30.
Up to 9am on Saturday, some 29,508 tests had been carried out across Scotland, England and Wales in laboratories organised by the NHS, Public Health England and the devolved administrations as well as commercially-run drive-through sites. Capacity was by Saturday morning almost 54,000 a day.
No 10 pointed out how the test numbers had a "significant time-lag" often seen on Monday, not reflecting the change over the weekend or the boost from the new testing online portal.
Today as of 9.10am, all 10,000 home testing kits available were ordered within an hour of going online while, as of 11.30am, around 18,000 of the 22,000 testing site slots had gone.
Downing Street played down expectations that it would be clear whether or not the Government had reached its testing target by the end of the month.
Boris Johnson’s spokesman explained: "It's going to take a little while longer for that to be clear."
He stressed the public would be able to judge if the Government had met its 100,000 a day target but admitted it would not be on Thursday and would be "difficult" to know on Friday, adding: "For example, home testing kits can take up to 72 hours to get the results for and, therefore, show up in the numbers."
Asked if the Government was confident of hitting the tests target, the spokesman replied: “We are working very hard to increase the capacity. Demand for the portal is continuing. We are trying our best to getting as many people as possible tested. We remain committed to hitting the target.”
There are now more than 40 drive-through sites operational across the country and the expectation is to increase this to 48 by the end of the week.
At present there are 11 mobile sites across Britain, each undertaking hundreds of tests on a daily basis but this number should increase to almost 100 by the weekend. These units will visit, among other places, care homes, prisons, benefit centres and fire and rescue services.
The tests are sent to laboratories for processing and the results are ready within 48 hours.
One of the Government’s five key tests on lifting restrictions is having confidence that “testing capacity” as well as Personal Protective Equipment are in hand with supply able to meet future.
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