Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what further steps he will take to ensure that the UK has sufficient surveillance capability to identify and monitor potential variants of covid-19.

The United Kingdom has surveillance systems in place to detect the prevalence and spread of new COVID-19 variants. We continue to test symptomatic patients in hospitals using PCR tests, which can then be genomically sequenced to check for new variants. The Office for National Statistics’ COVID-19 Infection Survey and other surveillance studies, also check for variants.

The surveillance arrangements we recently put in place in response to the COVID-19 surge in China, and the risk of new variants emerging there, are an example of the UK’s ability to respond to new threats and play our part in global surveillance arrangements. We now test a sample of adult passengers arriving on direct flights from China into Heathrow airport, so we can sequence positive results.

The UK’s sequencing data is shared rapidly to help support global awareness and health security. In the last 90 days our sequencing programmes have enabled almost 50,000 uploads of sequenced COVID-19 samples onto the international GISAID database. The UK’s COVID-19 surveillance programme remains amongst the largest in the world.

These measures will ensure we can work with partners across the UK and globally to identify and respond if a dangerous variant of COVID-19 emerges.