Government to double coronavirus testing with two new ‘megalabs’
The government has announced it will open two new “megalabs” to process a total of 600,000 coronavirus tests a day as part of plans to return Britain to normality next year.
The sites, in Leamington Spa and Scotland, will double the UK’s current testing capacity when they open in early 2021.
The government last month met its target of rolling out 500,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of October. Latest official data showed current capacity is around 519,000 tests a day — although the number of tests actually processed is much lower.
However, ministers last month were forced to pedal back from a target of 2m tests a day due to insufficient capacity.
The two new megalabs will not only test for Covid but for conditions such as cancer and cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and will each add 2,000 new jobs.
They will also strengthen the national infrastructure to respond to future epidemics and to improve care for other diseases such as cancer, health secretary Matt Hancock said.
“Transforming the UK’s diagnostic facilities is not only essential to beating this virus, but it is necessary to build back better — so we are better prepared in future for testing on a massive scale,” he added.
“The new labs build on our existing testing network which we created in a matter of months and confirms the UK as a world leader in diagnostics.”
The project marks the first in a “series of critical announcements” from Number 10 following the sudden exit of Boris Jonhson’s two most senior advisers over the weekend, a government spokesperson said.
It comes after NHS Test and Trace chief Baroness Dido Harding was last week hauled in front of the Health and Social Care Committee for her first public grilling over the contact tracing app.
Committee chair Jeremy Hunt pressured Harding to explain why only “three per cent of the total theoretical maximum” of people infected with coronavirus were self-isolating.
Harding stressed that the contact tracing programme, which has cost the Treasury upwards of £12bn so far this year, was largely dependent on having a fully operational testing system, adding that Hunt was being “slightly pessimistic”.
The government has faced mounting pressure to sack Harding, after the Test and Trace programme failed to deter a second wave of infections across the country.
England’s NHS Test and Trace scheme was introduced in May, after months of stalled progress following failed attempts to introduce a contact tracing app.
Harding today said that as more test sites were opened and mass coronavirus testing pilots rolled out “we need to keep expanding the UK’s testing capacity for now and the future”.
The two new labs would not only mean more tests “but will aso mean they can be processed more quickly and the time it takes to receive results is reduced”, she added.