The UK government intends to double the number of tests for the coronavirus run per day by the end of May and to carry out up to 200,000, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said that the country had begun producing a new reagent that would act as a confirmatory sample during COVID-19 tests and boost UK’s testing capability to detect the disease.
“We are running at about 100,000 a day, but the ambition, clearly, is to get up to 200,000 a day by the end of this month and then to go even higher,” Johnson told lawmakers at the House of Commons during Prime Minister’s Questions after undergoing treatment for COVID-19.
The prime minister added a fantastic testing regime would to be absolutely critical to the UK’s long-term economic recovery.
Over the past month, the UK has rapidly stepped up its testing capability to detect COVID-19 with Health Secretary Matt Hancock setting the target of conducting 100,000 tests per day by the end of April, which was reached on the last day of the month.However, the number of daily tests conducted in the country has since fallen.On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Social Care reported that 84,806 tests had been conducted over the past 24 hours.
The UK has registered 29,427 fatalities from the disease and nearly 195,000 COVID-19 cases since the outbreak of the virus in the country. (Sputnik/NAN)
