Coronavirus: Screening

(asked on 16th March 2020) - View Source

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 Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 24th March 2020

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.

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