Asked by: Sam Tarry (Labour - Ilford South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure provision of public information on covid-19 guidance in all languages spoken in cities throughout the UK.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
As part of the Government's work to ensure the population are informed about COVID-19 and how best to respond, work is ongoing to translate the stay at home guidance for households with possible coronavirus (COVID-19) and the guidance on social distancing for everyone in the United Kingdom and protecting older people and vulnerable adults (COVID-19) into a range of languages. These are the critical pieces of guidance that are relevant to a general public audience.
The translations include Polish, Welsh, Arabic (Modern), French, Simplified Chinese (Mandarin), Traditional Chinese (Cantonese), Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, and Portuguese.
Asked by: Sam Tarry (Labour - Ilford South)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how long the covid-19 testing and diagnosis process takes; and what steps he is taking to make covid-19 testing more (a) accessible and (b) efficient.
Answered by Jo Churchill - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
Testing in most laboratories currently takes 24-48 hours from the time a sample arrives. This is because of the numbers received and handling the COVID-19 specimens safely involves a complex laboratory process.
Public Health England (PHE) has rolled its own test out to a number of National Health Service collaborators to increase daily testing capacity and it is evaluating commercial tests to allow the NHS to consider faster tests.
On 17 March, the Prime Minister announced that capacity would increase to 25,000 a day in two weeks.